Kenema -It has laid waste to the tribal chiefdoms of Sierra
Leone, leaving hundreds dead, but the Ebola crisis began
with just one healer's claims to special powers.
The outbreak need never have spread from Guinea, health
officials revealed to AFP, except for a herbalist in the
remote eastern border village of Sokoma.
"She was claiming to have powers to heal Ebola. Cases
from Guinea were crossing into Sierra Leone for
treatment," Mohamed Vandi, the top medical official in the
hard-hit district of Kenema, told AFP.

"She got infected and died. During her funeral, women
around the other towns got infected."
Ebola has killed more than 1 220 people since it emerged
in southern Guinea at the start of the year, spreading first
to Liberia and cutting a gruesome and gory swathe
through eastern Sierra Leone since May.
The tropical pathogen can turn people into de facto
corpses with little higher brain function and negligible
motor control days before they die.
The virus attacks almost every section of tissue, reducing
organs and flesh in the most aggressive infections to a
pudding-like mush which leeches or erupts from the body.
The virus is highly infectious through exposure to bodily
fluids, and its early rapid spread in west Africa was
attributed in part to relatives touching victims during
traditional funeral rites.
The herbalist's mourners fanned out across the rolling
hills of the Kissi tribal chiefdoms, starting a chain reaction
of infections, deaths, funerals and more infections.
A worrying outbreak turned into a major epidemic when
the virus finally hit Kenema city on June 17.
An ethnically-diverse, Krio-speaking city of 190 000,
Kenema already has the highest incidence of Lassa fever
-- another viral haemorrhagic disease -- in the world.
But the brutality and cold efficiency of the Ebola virus --
described in medical literature as a "molecular shark" --
caught the city's shabby, chaotic hospital off-guard.
'Deadly and unforgiving'
Crumpled photographs of dead nurses cover noticeboards
on the flaking walls outside the maternity unit and in the
administration block.
Twelve nurses have been among 277 people to die since
the first case showed up in Kenema hospital. A further ten
have been infected with Ebola and survived.
"The nurses who lost their lives and those who got
infected would never have gone in knowing that they
would get infected," Vandi, the district medical officer, told
AFP.
"We are fighting a battle that is new. Ebola is new here
and we are all learning as we go along."
The first case at the hospital was a woman who had
partially miscarried, having probably passed the virus to
her unborn child.
source : news24