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Fresh Ebola Cases Damp Liberia Hopes of Eliminating Deadly Disease
New cases serve notice that the fight against the disease will take months, even years
By DREW HINSHAW in Monrovia, Liberia, and BETSY MCKAY in Atlanta
Dec. 9, 2015 7:31 p.m. ET
Nurses at a downtown Monrovia hospital were about to punch out from work late one November afternoon when a feverish teenager, convulsing and bleeding from his mouth, stumbled into the waiting room.
For Mosoka Fallah, the boy?s symptoms pointed in a grimly familiar direction. He drove off?speeding in the wrong lane and dodging head-on traffic?to a meeting of government officials in the center of the capital, where he burst into the room with the news: Ebola is back.
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Dr. Fallah, the physician who drove off to deliver the news, said the boy?s mother had survived Ebola last year, then gave birth to a child in September.
About two weeks after the birth, her husband fell ill with fever. He later tested positive for Ebola, raising the question whether childbirth presents a window when survivors of the disease can infect people close to them, Dr. Fallah said.
?It is exhausting,? he said. ?Nobody knew these recurrences would happen.?
On a recent morning, Dr. Fallah was in the government?s Ebola command center, surrounded by bone-weary health workers trying to monitor the condition and whereabouts of 139 potentially infected people.
Some patients had slipped out of quarantine because nobody remembered to bring them breakfast. ?Contacts not getting food!? screamed an angry worker.
A whiteboard listed 20 people still unaccounted for, several of whom seemed to have turned off their phones.
Holding up a map of Monrovia, a city of one million people stretching across 100 square miles, Dr. Fallah pleaded to his staff, ?I need you to find those people!?
New cases serve notice that the fight against the disease will take months, even years
By DREW HINSHAW in Monrovia, Liberia, and BETSY MCKAY in Atlanta
Dec. 9, 2015 7:31 p.m. ET
Nurses at a downtown Monrovia hospital were about to punch out from work late one November afternoon when a feverish teenager, convulsing and bleeding from his mouth, stumbled into the waiting room.
For Mosoka Fallah, the boy?s symptoms pointed in a grimly familiar direction. He drove off?speeding in the wrong lane and dodging head-on traffic?to a meeting of government officials in the center of the capital, where he burst into the room with the news: Ebola is back.
...
Dr. Fallah, the physician who drove off to deliver the news, said the boy?s mother had survived Ebola last year, then gave birth to a child in September.
About two weeks after the birth, her husband fell ill with fever. He later tested positive for Ebola, raising the question whether childbirth presents a window when survivors of the disease can infect people close to them, Dr. Fallah said.
?It is exhausting,? he said. ?Nobody knew these recurrences would happen.?
On a recent morning, Dr. Fallah was in the government?s Ebola command center, surrounded by bone-weary health workers trying to monitor the condition and whereabouts of 139 potentially infected people.
Some patients had slipped out of quarantine because nobody remembered to bring them breakfast. ?Contacts not getting food!? screamed an angry worker.
A whiteboard listed 20 people still unaccounted for, several of whom seemed to have turned off their phones.
Holding up a map of Monrovia, a city of one million people stretching across 100 square miles, Dr. Fallah pleaded to his staff, ?I need you to find those people!?
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