Can a U.S. military Ebola treatment center slow Ebola in one hard-hit city? – The Washington Post

 

Nurses working at the Ebola holding center at the Ganta Hospital prepare to enter the compound’s high-risk zone by putting on protective equipment in Ganta, Liberia.

The site of the U.S. military’s future Ebola treatment center is now an overgrown grassland next to an abandoned airstrip on the Guinean border.

Two miles away, in a converted eye clinic that now houses a makeshift Ebola ward, this county’s sole doctor is waiting. He will soon run out of protective gear. Some of his employees haven’t been paid for a month.

that anxiety when it erects the new treatment center, slated to be ­finished later this month and manned by newly imported doctors. Just the sight of American helicopters flying over Ganta, a city of about 50,000, has lifted hopes here.

But a modern treatment center won’t be enough to eliminate Ebola in a place where the outbreak ­appears to rise and fall every few weeks and where victims sometimes disappear into remote communities with the disease. The question is whether those victims can be persuaded to use the new facility once it is built, preventing the spread of the disease in some of the country’s most vulnerable ­areas.

Although it once looked as if Ganta might be spared from the epidemic, that illusion was shattered in August, when people with the disease began fleeing from Monrovia,

. Many of them ended up here, a six-hour drive away, in search of care in the homes of their relatives and away from the capital’s congested slums.

Roseline Tokpah, 40, was one of the first. She left Monrovia and made the nearly 200-mile trip to her family’s native village on the outskirts of Ganta. Her parents, brothers and sisters tended to her. Her pastor prayed over her. All of them made physical contact. After she died, Liberian health officials traced about 30 Ebola cases in Ganta back to her. Many of them died, too.

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