A few weeks ago, a Liberian man passing through Accra, Ghana for a few days on his way to a medical conference in Nairobi, Kenya started feeling unwell and feverish. He called the WHO in Nairobi and informed them he wasn't well, suspecting Ebola. The WHO contact in Nairobi called my aunt, a doctor who works for the WHO in Ghana. My aunt hastily organized an Ebola response team and ambulance and dispatched it to the hotel where he was staying. The doctors and ambulance arrived at the hotel equipped with masks, hazmat suits and protective equipment only to discover that the man had gone to the mall! The doctors then managed to contact him at the mall and eventually conveyed him to the isolation unit at the hospital where he was tested for Ebola. The tests eventually come back negative but he remained in quarantine for the full 21 days until the all clear was given.
This, of course, was the height of irresponsibility. The man clearly knew enough given his symptoms to seek medical advice and to contact the WHO in a different country. But I can't believe that he then decided to leave his hotel room to go to a shopping mall. Ghana certainly dodged a bullet, we are lucky that he didn't have Ebola. Indeed given the traffic between Liberia and Ghana, we have been lucky that Ebola hasn't made its way to the country yet. Based on air traffic patterns, Ghana has been modeled as the most likely country to experience Ebola importation. We have seen the effect of a single infection in the most developed countries, and the contrast in countries with poor public health infrastructure.
My aunt had just returned from a harrowing five week tour of duty helping run the WHO Ebola response in Liberia. The thing she emphasized most about her experience was just how easy it was to inadvertently get infected. The example she cites was someone simply dropping something at the end of the 19th of the 20 steps one has to go through when removing ...
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