Declan Walsh
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
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.
But he was also more broadly angry
angry at the international response system towards Ebola, he turned around to me at one point and he said, here we are in Mangualu, in the town where the epidemic started, where there are the highest number of cases, and yet this is the best we can do.
Now, it's important to say that there is aid coming into this area.
In the capital, Bunja, where I'm currently speaking from, there is an airport where planes are coming in, bringing supplies, much-needed supplies.
There are other treatment centers being set up as well.
But the challenge is, because data is so sparse, we don't really know the extent of this outbreak, how deep or how far it has spread inside the population.
We don't really know if these facilities are going to be enough because the aid effort is so far behind the curve, it's not even keeping pace with this outbreak as of now.