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Ebola case spike in remote Sierra Leone district prompts concern
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A WHO rapid response team confirmed a spike in Ebola cases in the remote diamond district of Kono in eastern Sierra Leone adjacent to Guinea.
The outbreak in Kono highlights the need to work to contain the burgeoning outbreaks in small villages and remote areas, which potentially can continue to grow and remain hidden while world attention on the outbreak is focused on urban centers.
In response to intelligence from the Ministry of Health of Sierra Leone, WHO sent an epidemiologist to Kono to evaluate the number of reported Ebola cases. Additional investigators from WHO and CDC joined the surveillance, and they found that in 11 days, two teams buried 87 bodies. The dead included a nurse, ambulance driver and janitor tasked with “removing bodies as they piled up at the only area hospital,” according to a WHO press release.
The hospital was ill-equipped to deal with Ebola. In the 5 days before the epidemiologic team arrived, 25 people died in a section of the main hospital that had been cordoned off to serve as a makeshift Ebola holding center. As of Dec. 9, the Kono district, which includes more than 350,000 people, has reported 119 cases of Ebola. Eight of the district’s 15 chiefdoms are affected.
“Our team met heroic doctors and nurses at their wits’ end, exhausted burial teams and lab techs, all doing the best they could, but they simply ran out of resources and were overrun with gravely ill people,” Olu Olushayo, MD, WHO National Coordinator of Ebola Epidemic Response, said in the release. “In districts like Kono, with moderate transmission confined to limited villages and chiefdoms, the best chance of eliminating transmission is through aggressive and comprehensive case investigation and contact tracing.”
The situation in Kono has yielded an international response from WHO field staff, doctors from Partners in Health and Wellbody Alliance, the International Federation of the Red Cross and the CDC, as well as the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response.