Despite aid push, Ebola raging in Sierra Leone

KISSI TOWN, Sierra Leone — Military choppers thunder over the slums. Nearly 1,000 British soldiers are on the scene, ferrying supplies and hammering together new Ebola clinics. Crates of food and medicine are flowing into the port, and planeloads of experts seem to arrive every day: Ugandan doctors, Chinese epidemiologists, Australian logisticians, even an ambulance specialist from London.

But none of it was reaching Isatu Sesay, a sick teenager. Her family and neighbors called an Ebola hotline more than 35 times, desperate for an ambulance.

For three days straight, Isatu’s mother did not leave her post on the porch, face gaunt, arms slack, eyes fixed up the road toward the capital, Freetown, where the Ebola command center was less than 45 minutes away.

“This is nonsense,” said M.C. Kabia, coordinator of the volunteer Ebola task force in Isatu’s area. Help rarely came, he said, and people were quietly dying all over the place.

While health officials say they are making headway against the Ebola epidemic in neighboring Liberia, the disease is still raging in Sierra Leone, despite the big international push. In November alone, the World Health Organization has reported more than 1,800 new cases in this country, about three times as many as in Liberia, which until recently had been the center of the outbreak.

More than six weeks ago, international health officials conceded that they were overwhelmed in Sierra Leone and reluctantly announced a Plan B. Until enough hospital beds could be built here, they pledged to at least help families tend to their sick loved ones at home.

The health officials admitted Plan B was a major defeat, but said the approach would only be temporary and promised to supply basics like protective gloves, painkillers and rehydration salts.

Even that did not happen in Isatu’s case. Nobody brought her food. Nobody brought her any rehydration salts or Tylenol.

Community volunteers said Isatu’s case was the norm, not the exception.

“We have a huge number of death cases,” said Kabia, the volunteer Ebola coordinator in Isatu’s area, Kissi Town, adding that residents rarely survived because of the slow response.

Discouraged, scared and furious, Sierra Leoneans are taking matters into their own hands. Laid-off teachers (all schools in this country are closed) race around on motorbikes, monitoring the sick. In some villages, informal isolation centers are popping up, with citizens quarantining one another. U.S. officials say this country is still short hundreds of thousands of protective suits.

Western officials are quick to add that even if all the resources were in the right place, that would not stop the virus.

“You can have as many helicopters, ships and kit here as you’d like,” said Lt. Col. Matt Petersen, a British adviser. “But unless you change behavior, it’s not going to stop transmission.”

On Saturday afternoon, Isatu’s neighbors saw what they had been waiting for, rumbling up the road: A white truck with “Break the Chain” painted on the hood.

Help had finally arrived.

But this was not the Ebola team they had hoped for, evident by the way the workers slowly exited the vehicle and quietly suited up.

Isatu had died in the evening. The family said she was around 16 and loved a local game called balance ball.

The burial team moved fast, four white blurs through the door. Her mother seemed too exhausted to cry.