Lena H. Sun, Brady Dennis, Lenny Bernstein, Joel Achenbach
Published on October 4, 2014
How the world’s health organizations failed to stop the Ebola disaster
Tom Frieden remembers the young woman with the beautiful hair, dyed a rusty gold and braided meticulously, elaborately, perhaps by someone who loved her very much. She was lying facedown, half off the mattress. She had been dead for hours, and flies had found the bare flesh of her legs.
Two other bodies lay nearby. Bedridden patients who had not yet succumbed said of the dead, "Please, get them out of here."
Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), knew it was no simple matter to properly carry away a body loaded with Ebola virus. It takes four people wearing protective suits, one at each corner of the body bag. On that grim day near the end of August, in a makeshift Ebola ward in Monrovia, Liberia, burial teams already had lugged 60 victims to a truck for the trip to the crematorium.
Frieden had seen plenty of death over the years, but this was far worse than he expected, a plague on a medieval scale. "A scene out of Dante," he called it. …
-go to link-
No comments:
Post a Comment