Experts has traced the course of spread of the deadly Ebola virus outbreak down to a 2-year-old boy who died on Dec. 6, just a few days after falling ill in a village in Guéckédou, in southeastern Guinea. Guinea has three countries bordering it which are, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
A week later, the boy’s mother died after being ill with the same symptoms as her son. Then his 3-year-old sister, then followed by his grandmother. All had fever, vomiting and diarrhea, but then, no one knew what was happening and what the disease was about. No one knew that the strange and tragic death was what we all are going to refer to as Ebola virus outbreak.
The chain didn't stop there. During the grandmother's funeral. Two mourners contracted the virus and transported it home to their villages. furthermore, a health worker carried it to still another, where he died, as well as his doctor. The both infected their relatives from other towns.
By the time Ebola was recognized, in March, dozens of people had died in eight Guinean communities, and suspected cases were popping up in three of the world’s poorest countries recovering from years of political dysfunction and civil war: Liberia and Sierra Leone. It all started in Guéckédou, where it all began this 2014.
On March 31, Doctors Without Borders , which has intervened in many Ebola virus outbreak (s), called this one is “unprecedented,” and then warned that the disease had erupted in so many locations with a little period of time and fighting it would be enormously difficult.
Also, this parts of Africa had never seen Ebola virus before. Health workers did not recognize it earlier, just like earth being hit by an alien attack. They also had neither the training nor the equipment to avoid infecting themselves or other patients. These countries lack water which would have reduced the spread as individuals and health workers has always lacked running water to even wash their hands.
Hospitals in these regions lack gloves, and other hospital equipments which provides a fertile ground for epidemics. Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the World Health Organization said. “Earlier on in the Ebola virus outbreak, we had at least 26 villages or little towns that would not cooperate with responders in terms of letting people into the village, even,”
He continued by saying that the Ebola virus outbreak has occurred in three waves: The first two were relatively
small, and the third, starting about a month ago, was much larger, Mr. Hartl said. “That third wave was a
clarion call,” he said.
The people will also bot allow their family members to be taken into isolation. With the reason being that the doctors their are killing them. So when they discover the symptoms of the disease on their loved ones they hoard the person who eventually dies inside their house. The virus being more virulent and active when its victim are dead will spread to the victim's relatives and family and the virus continues from there. Reports has it that dead bodies of Ebola victims has being found dumped along the streets of this countries. These cannot help the world combat against this virus.
At a House subcommittee hearing on Thursday, Ken Isaacs, a vice president of Samaritan’s Purse, said his aid group and Doctors Without Borders were doing much of the work on the Ebola virus outbreak. “That the world would allow two relief agencies to shoulder this burden along with the overwhelmed Ministries of Health in these countries testifies to the lack of serious attention the epidemic was given,” he said.
In mid-March, Guinea’s Ministry of Health asked Doctors Without Borders for help in Guéckédou. At first, the group’s experts suspected Lassa fever, a viral disease endemic in West Africa. But this illness became worse. Isolation units were set up, and tests confirmed Ebola virus. Like many African cities and towns, this region hums with motorcycle taxis and minivans crammed with passengers. The mobility, and now the sheer numbers, make the basic work of containing the disease a monumental task. The only way to stop an outbreak is to isolate infected patients, trace all their contacts, isolate the ones who get sick and repeat the process until, finally, there are no more cases. But how do you do that when there can easily be 500 names on the list of contacts who are supposed to be tracked down and checked for fever every day for 21 days? “They go to the field to work their crops,” said Monia Sayah, a nurse sent in by Doctors Without Borders. “Some have phones, but the networks don’t always work. Some will say, ‘I’m fine; you don’t have to come,’ but we really have to see them and take their temperature. But if someone wants to lie and take Tylenol, they won’t have a temperature.”
At Donka Hospital in Guinea’s capital, Dr. Simon Mardel, a British emergency physician who has worked in seven previous hemorrhagic fever outbreaks and was sent to Guinea by the World Health Organization, realized this Ebola virus outbreak was the worst he had seen. A man had arrived late one night, panting and with abdominal pain. During the previous few days, he had been treated at two private clinics, given intravenous fluids and sent home. The staff did not suspect Ebola virus because he had no fever. But fever can diminish at the end stage of the disease.
The treatment room at Donka was poorly lit and had no sink. There were few buckets of chlorine solution, and the staff found it impossible to clean their hands between patients. The man died two hours after arriving. Tests later showed he had been positive for Ebola. Untold numbers of health care workers and their subsequent patients had been exposed to the disease. Gloves, in short supply at the hospitals, were selling for 50 cents a pair on the open market, a huge sum for people who often live on less than a dollar a day. At homes where families cared for patients, even plastic buckets to hold water and bleach for washing hands and disinfecting linens were lacking.
Workers were failing to trace all patients’ contacts. The resulting unsuspected cases, appearing at hospitals without standard infection control measures, worsened the spread in a “vicious circle,” Dr. Mardel said. Tracing an Epidemic’s Origins. As is often the case in Ebola virus outbreaks, no one knows how the first person got the disease or how the virus found its way to the region. The virus infects monkeys and apes, and some previous epidemics are thought to have begun when someone was exposed to blood while killing or butchering an infected animal.
Cooking will destroy the virus, so the risk is not in eating the meat, but in handling it raw. Ebola virus is also thought to infect fruit bats without harming them, so the same risks apply to butchering bats. Some researchers also think that people might become infected by eating fruit or other uncooked foods contaminated by droppings from infected bats.
Once people become ill, their bodily fluids can infect others, and they become more infectious as the illness progresses. The disease does not spread through the air like the flu; contact with fluids is necessary, usually through the eyes, nose, mouth or cuts in the skin. One drop of blood can harbor millions of viruses, and corpses become like virus bombs.
A research team that studied the Guinea outbreak had made this trace of the disease down to the 2-year-old who died in Guéckédou and published a report in The New England Journal of Medicine. The boy and his relatives were never tested to confirm Ebola, but their symptoms matched it and they fit into a pattern of transmission that included other cases confirmed by blood tests. But no one can explain how such a small child could have become the first person infected.
Many health workers has losed their lives, killed by the virus while trying to take care of the sick. Some of them have falling sick while others have remained at home in fear. A very sad story had it that at a government hospital in Kenema, Dr. Sheik Umar Khan was leading the efforts to treat patients and control the epidemic.
But he was desperate for supplies: chlorine for disinfection, gloves, goggles, protective suits, rudimentary sugar and salt solutions to fight dehydration and give patients a chance to survive. Early in July, he emailed friends and former medical school classmates in the United States, asking for their help and sending a spreadsheet listing what he needed, and what he had. Many of the lines in the “available” column were empty. One
