KOIDU, Sierra Leone - The rapid response team has arrived and the chaos is easing, but medics in a remote Sierra Leonean district are struggling to control a local Ebola outbreak when it's too late to nip it in the bud.
A deployment of medical workers and equipment to Kono District has been the fastest so far in Sierra Leone, a country with nearly half the total Ebola cases,- under a strategy of tackling epidemic hotspots before they get too big.
But officials say responses need to be yet faster to fight the fever that has killed more than 7,000 people across West Africa.
In Koidu, the capital of Kono district, people continue to die of what is thought to be Ebola while others seem unaware of the risks. A Reuters reporter saw a young man lying on a city street, vomiting. He died there before an ambulance could come.
An almost hysterical soldier ordered bystanders next to the highly contagious corpse, who were wearing open-toed rubber flip-flops, to stand back. "This is the reason we have Ebola. Your bad habits. Look at you, in slippers, in slippers!" he yelled.
Less than a month ago, conditions were far worse. A small team of local nurses left at the makeshift Ebola centre were so afraid of patients they resorted to throwing packets of medicine inside, according to two U.S. doctors on the scene.
Suspected and confirmed Ebola patients were mixed together, sometimes next to corpses. A single trolley was used to move the dead and mattresses were soiled with diarrhoea.
While fellow Americans celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday in late November, the two doctors witnessed a descent into chaos in Kono, about 450 km (280 miles) east of the capital Freetown.
"By Thanksgiving things had exploded. The hospital was getting overrun by Ebola patients," said Dan Kelly, one of the doctors and founder of the non-profit organisation Wellbody Alliance. Ten staff at the centre caught Ebola and five have died so far.
Shortly afterwards, help began to arrive in Kono, which lies in the diamond mining eastern province, and the Red Cross is building a 30-bed treatment centre.
The buzzwords in the international strategy for stamping out the nine month-old epidemic - which has hit Liberia and Guinea as well as Sierra Leone - are "rapid response": quickly mobilising flexible teams to prevent new hotspots from emerging.
Fernando Fernandez, a member of the European Commission's Ebola response team in Freetown, said this was not yet being matched in Sierra Leone. "Kono is the fastest response so far in the country. But we have to be much faster than that. We should be aiming at what they are doing in Liberia."
Reuters
