Clarissa Ward

speaker

326 appearances 5 recordings 4 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 4 Jun

Clarissa Ward’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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Today with David McCullagh · On the frontlines of the Ebola Crisis · 4 Jun 2026 podcast

And you really had a sense of how absolutely petrifying this is for the victims.

It absolutely is, and they are unquestionably the heroes of this whole crisis.

There are now much more resources in terms of PPE, but earlier on particularly, and of course in rural areas especially, you had healthcare workers going into these red zones with minimal PPE.

And according to one NGO here, Aleema, more than 40 health care workers are believed to have contracted Ebola.

So that's a huge sacrifice that you're seeing from these doctors and nurses and health care workers who have been going in to the red zone every single day, regardless of the risk to their own livelihood.

There's no vaccine, there's no treatment.

And I think it's important to underscore so your listeners get a sense of how this spreads so quickly for so long without being detected.

This is a different strain of Ebola to the Zaire strain, which is the more common one that we saw in 2014, again in 2019.

And so in the early days when people were showing these symptoms,

They would take the Ebola test, but because it was for the Zaire strain, the tests were coming back negative.

And that cost authorities weeks and weeks in terms of trying to contain the outbreak.

It does, but I think it's also important to understand that with the correct protocols and practices, Ebola is not COVID.

It's actually quite difficult to contract.

It is not airborne.

It can only be passed on through bodily fluids.

And someone who, even if they have the virus incubating inside them, unless they are symptomatic, they are not contagious.

So it's only when someone has a fever and is feeling desperately sick that they become a threat to the community.

They do.

You see the families, they are camped outside these tents.

They are preparing food.

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