WHO to declare end of Ebola in Sierra Leone
The World Health Organization is set to
announce Saturday that Ebola-ravaged
Sierra Leone has beaten an epidemic
that killed almost 4,000 of its people and
plunged the economy into recession.
The former British colony recorded
around half of the cases in an outbreak
that has infected 28,600 people across
the three hardest-hit west African
nations and claimed 11,300 lives since
December 2013.
Experts agree that the real death toll is
almost certainly significantly higher
than the official data, which has been
skewed by the under-reporting of deaths
in many probable Ebola cases.
Save the Children sounded the alarm
Friday over the long-term impact on 1.8
million children who missed nine
months of school, pointing to a
“significant spike in adolescent
pregnancies”.
The crisis took a devastating toll on
primary health services and
immunisation programmes, with the
deaths of 221 medical staff — five
percent of frontline doctors and seven
percent of nurses and midwives.
– ‘No elaborate celebration’ –
A country is considered free of human-
to-human transmission once two 21-day
incubation periods have passed since the
last known case tested negative for a
second time.
After several false-starts, Sierra Leone’s
countdown finally began on September
25, three weeks after the WHO had
declared neighbouring Liberia Ebola-
free following 4,800 deaths there.
Guinea, where around 2,500 died, still
has a handful of cases and Sierra Leone
has announced heightened security and
health screening at their shared border.
Guinea is also monitoring 382 possible
contacts of known cases, 141 of them
deemed “high risk”, according to the
WHO.
Palo Conteh, the head of Sierra Leone’s
Ebola response, has indicated that there
are no plans for “an elaborate
celebration” of the country’s Ebola-free
status.
The WHO is due to deliver a formal
declaration in Freetown of the end of the
epidemic while President Ernest Bai
Koroma will address aid agencies,
healthcare professionals and other key
workers.
“Thank God it is all over and we now
live in peace,” said Mamie Kabia, 25, a
member of one of the expert teams
burying highly infectious bodies around
the clock at the height of the crisis.
The epidemic was first reported in Sierra
Leone 18 months ago, when a woman
tested positive after contracting the virus
at the funeral of a healer who had been
treating Ebola patients on the Guinea
border.
– ‘I died several times’ –
At the peak of the outbreak in 2014,
Sierra Leone and its neighbours were
reporting hundreds of new cases a week,
with social order on the brink of
collapse.
Koroma drew criticism from the
international community for a number
of lock-downs confining millions to their
homes — measures that which were
deemed punitive and self-defeating.
While the primary cost of the outbreak
has been in human life, the crisis has
also wiped out development gains in
Sierra Leone, which was devastated by
11 years of civil war ending in 2002.
The World Bank estimates that Sierra
Leone will lose at least $1.4 billion in
forgone economic growth in 2015 as a
result, leading to an “unprecedented”
GDP contraction of more than 20
percent.
Across the country, Ebola workers
recounted their own personal horror
stories as they voiced relief ahead of
Saturday’s declaration.
James Hamilton, a cemetery worker who
interred the first victim in the capital,
told AFP he had personally overseen
more than 600 such burials.
In Kambia district, close to the Guinea
border, ambulance driver Ferenka
Koroma said his worst experiences came
when he was transporting bodies to
burial sites.
“I hated the smell of chlorine. They say
you only die once, but I died several
times. But it is good it is now over,” he
told AFP.
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