Everybody who is scared by Ebola needs to read this. It has not been published anywhere and I am posting it here with the permission of my extraordinary friend Dr. Estrella Lasry, who originally sent this to some of her friends as a private email from West Africa, where she is one of the key members of the MSF/Doctors Without Borders team. Please share it so that more people know the conditions under which these amazing people are working and make a donation to MSF today via the link below as they really are the unsung heroes in the front line against Ebola. In the field with the invisible enemy You cant see it, you dont know who has it, you dont know if what youre doing to protect yourself is enough to keep you safe, and this affects every moment of your day in Monrovia. If you think about it, the number of Ebola cases in the city is reported to be over 2500, but its probably closer to 3 times that amount, nobody really knows despite all the data thats being collected and all the models that different universities have developed. Even if the now more than 10,000 cases reported in this outbreak in West Africa had been in this city, it would still mean that less than 1% of the population had had Ebola at some point in the past 5 months. Yet, it has affected every part of daily life. You dont shake hands or kiss anyone, and that applies to people working in your team as well, you keep a safe distance when youre talking to someone, you wash your hands with chlorinated water an uncountable number of times a day, to avoid the invisible enemy. We have a person checking temperature and another one to spray our soles with chlorine at the entrance of the compound, and if anyone has a fever an immediate procedure starts to assess whether or not you may need to get transferred to get tested for Ebola. And the team at ELWA3 is treating patients, in the place where the virus is most concentrated, but also in the place where you somehow feel, in a strange way, most safe, mainly because theres no uncertainty, the patients are there. You see them come, and you watch around 60% of them die, sometimes one family member after the other, sometimes when you thought they were out of the danger zone. Youre in a full hazmat suit, at 30 degrees in the sun, in a tent, but youre lucky to be healthy and alive. Im not here to directly care for Ebola patients, but to work on the collateral damage of this outbreak. A collapsing healthcare system in which most resources have shifted to contain the disease from spreading. A population which, other than Ebola still falls ill to the usual suspects. Malaria, respiratory tract infections, diarrhea and maternal health are still here, and Ebola didnt manage to kill them, rather to reduce the care that can be provided to manage them, not only due to the shift of resources, but also because the population has lost trust in healthcare facilities which have been amplifying sites of this epidemic. Were here temporarily and we feel the constraints of living in these conditions. The population here is devastated. Not only do they live with fear of the invisible enemy, but along with family members, relatives, and neighbors, it has taken away schooling, classes at university, social gatherings, and has set a curfew so no movements are allowed from 11pm to 6 am. All in the struggle to reduce the spread of the epidemic. And after living in this context, we are lucky to be able to go back home. Except now theres the added stress that you may actually not be able to do that. That you will get to the airport and get treated like a criminal and put in a tent while someone figures out what they need to do with you. You will also come back home to stigma and fear. To hoping that 21 days go by and you dont get sick, knowing that after 6 weeks under this level of stress, chances are that you wont feel at the top of your game. And if you do feel sick and follow the procedure we need to, the press will somehow get to your apartment before the ambulance does, and everybody reading the paper on the subway will be seeing your picture, as if getting Ebola wasnt already bad enough. Whatever happened to patient confidentiality? Nevertheless we will continue to come to West Africa. This is where the outbreak is and this is where we are needed and where were making a difference, even though the invisible enemy is way ahead and we struggle to catch up. doctorswithoutborders.org/
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 01:41:01 +0000
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