Declan Walsh

When I walked into the Ebola ward in Mangualu General Hospital, the first thing that struck me was how many people were walking around without any form of protection.

A handful of people were wearing rubber gloves.

Some of them had pulled a scarf or part of their sweater across their mouths.

But for the most part, people were wearing nothing.

And that meant that they were at great risk of catching the virus that causes Ebola themselves.

The other thing was just how tightly packed the patients were.

In that small ward that we visited, we found a five-year-old boy who had just come in the night before with incessant bleeding from his nose.

He was lying on the bed with a tissue stuffed into his nose to staunch the bleeding with his dad watching over him.

But just two beds away from that boy lay the body of a 21-year-old woman who had died yesterday.

during the night and her remains had still not been removed.

Now, the bodies of people who have just died from Ebola are incredibly infectious, yet it was just covered by a thin sheet that had been pulled over.

That only added to that sense of danger inside that treatment facility.

And in fact, people were being infected at the hospital because when we went into the next ward, we found the lab technician from the hospital who himself had gotten infected

apparently infected with Ebola as part of his job taking samples from other people.

And we later learned that seven other staff members from that hospital had already died from the virus.

That was just a sign of how bad conditions were in that hospital.

And I was brought around the ward by a young Congolese doctor.

He told me he was angry.

He was angry at his own government, which had taken so long to detect this outbreak.

It appears there was at least six weeks between the outbreak starting and the first case being tested and detected.