• published: 10 Aug 2014
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Ebola Virus Fears Infect an African Hospital-patients, nurses and health workers have died here ‘Don’t Touch the Walls’: Ebola Virus Fears Infect an African Hospital for more go on link: Inside Hospital’s Ebola Battle At the government hospital in Kenema, Sierra Leone, health care workers struggle to contain the Ebola epidemic, which has killed almost 1,000 people across West Africa. KENEMA, Sierra Leone — So many patients, nurses and health workers have died in the government hospital that many people in this city, a center of the world’s worst Ebola epidemic, see it as a death trap. Now, the wards are empty in the principal institution fighting the disease. Ebola stalks the city, claiming lives every day, but patients have fled the hospital’s long, narrow buildings, which sit silent and echoing in the fading light. Few people are taking any chances by coming here. “Don’t touch the walls!” a Western medical technician yelled out. “Totally infected.” Some Ebola patients still die at the hospital, perhaps four per day, in the tentlike temporary isolation ward at the back of the muddy grounds. But just as many, if not more, are dying in the city and neighboring villages, greatly increasing the risk of spreading the disease and undermining international efforts to halt the epidemic. “People don’t die here now,” said the deputy chief of the hospital’s burying team, Albert J. Mattia, exasperated after a long day of Ebola burials. “They are dying in the community, five, six a day.” Mr. Mattia was particularly disturbed that many of the bodies his team were putting in the ground had come from outside the hospital, thwarting attempts to isolate patients and prevent them from passing the disease to others. Photo Medical workers transferred the body of a man who died of Ebola to the morgue in Kenema, Sierra Leone. “It’s very, very dangerous, very hazardous; it is contributing to the Ebola dead,” he said as his two deputies nodded glumly in agreement. “You go to the wards, there are no patients.” Containing the virus in Kenema — one of the nation’s largest cities and a gateway to an area of the country where the disease is rampant — is critical to taming the epidemic’s deadly advance across parts of West Africa. More than 930 people, including over 280 here in Sierra Leone, have died since the outbreak was first identified across the border in Guinea in March. Since then, Sierra Leone has been hit with more cases of the disease than any other nation — 691out of 1,711 at last count — and the hospital in Kenema quickly became a focal point in the effort to grapple with the epidemic when the government set up a treatment center here for cases in the region. International health officials have concentrated intensively on the hospital in the last several days, training health care workers, preparing a more secure isolation ward, establishing the rigorous separation of zones — low risk, high risk — that characterizes the tightly sealed Doctors Without Borders Ebola facilities elsewhere in stricken West Africa. But it is a tough struggle, and the recent history of the hospital looms. More than 20 health care workers at the hospital have died trying to battle the disease over the last several months, including nurses, support staff and the country’s leading doctor. At the edge of the tented isolation ward, relatives come to visit Ebola patients over a white plastic fence with a six-and-a-half-foot buffer. Erison Moussa Touray, 22, tossed a bag of clothes over the fence to his older sister, Aminata Saidu. He is an Ebola survivor; she is a patient, along with their mother, Bandu Touray. The two patients looked anxious, but they were at least able to greet him. “I hope for my mother,” said Mr. Touray, explaining that he had lost 16 family members to Ebola. “She’s the only one I have left.” “Sometimes I sit down, and I don’t know what will make me to courage,” he said in the English patois common here. “My father, my brothers, all have passed away.” He shouted encouragements to his mother and sister across the fence: Eat more, drink more. He asked them what sort of food they wanted: fufu, a staple made from grain. “From this illness, I am not comedy anymore,” said Mr. Touray, a clerk for the local magistrate’s court. “I am tragedy. Very tragedy.”