A Quote by Ofeibea Quist-Arcton
There was something that was killing the people in the interior, in the forest area, of the country, and nobody quite knew what it was. That lasted a good three months before it was officially declared that it was Ebola virus. So it started off in Guinea and spread quite slowly, but then spread over the border into Sierra Leone and Liberia.
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Ebola has killed almost 12,000 people and at least 500 health workers. So it affected the entire population. And as you know, the World Health Organization was accused of not having declared an epidemic soon enough. And that's when we saw Ebola rampaging through Sierra Leone, Liberia and, to a lesser extent, Guinea.
Guinea has managed to go 42 days consecutively without any new Ebola infections. And that comes after neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia, the other two West African countries that were hardest hit by Ebola, have been through the same cycle of zero Ebola cases.
I was born and raised in Liberia in West Africa. My mother is Sierra Leonean, and my father's Liberian. I grew up at a time when there was a lot of civil unrest in both countries, so when something would happen in Liberia, we'd go to Sierra Leone, and when something would happen in Sierra Leone, we'd go back to Liberia. We moved to save our lives.
Sierra Leone and Liberia must remain vigilant, that if you think somebody is sick with Ebola, you must get help immediately. Otherwise there could be a resurgence of Ebola. So everybody must remain vigilant.
Ebola isn't a respiratory virus. It doesn't spread through the airborne route. So it's not likely to spread like wildfire around the world and kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. That's what I think of as the next big one.
How do we explain for example the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea Conakry? Those very powers that swindled and occupied them, in the face of the serious situation of social emergency, have not even had the capacity to send doctors there. In some cases they have sent in militaries instead because that is what they are compelled to do. They have had to send military to do it because they do not even have any doctors with the willingness to risk their lives in order to help those people that are precisely paying for the consequences of years of colonization.
It's the advantage of the virus to spread, and you can only spread when you infect people and they infect other people without necessarily killing them. So if you had 100 percent mortality, the potential pandemic would almost self-eliminate itself.
What the experts are telling me is that there's very little chance that Ebola is going to mutate into something that could spread directly through the air. The real concern is not whether Ebola could go airborne, but whether it could spread faster.
Is Guinea prepared? And that's the question because of course these three countries had very, very weak health institutions. Many people had said that there was denial in Guinea, that many people in Guinea either said that Ebola did not exist or were hostile to any sort of Ebola health and safety awareness - how to deal with it.
When we talked about going to help Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea Conakry how many doctors in Cuba raised their hands to go? 15 thousand. In their homes they said, "We are willing to go risk our lives to help other countries". That is true medicine; it is the true observance of the Hippocratic Oath that doctors swear to.
No one else will really care, but I missed the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Also the war in Chechnya.
A virus has three purposes: to duplicate, to infiltrate and to spread from one host to the next. Ultimately, even a single virus can shut down an entire system.
The Nigerians have been very instrumental in preserving stability in Sierra Leone. They have done this at considerable cost in dollars and Nigerian lives. The US should encourage Nigeria to stay in Sierra Leone.
I don't feel pride when I look at a magazine spread I did for Vogue, but writing is really satisfying to me. I can go so deep into people's interior lives, slowly and with complexity, over years and years sometimes. That's very rewarding, in a way that modelling never was.
We don't know what we don't know about Ebola. We think we know it's a virus, but is it mutating? Can it be spread by airborne?
From Mozambique to Chad, South Africa and Liberia, Sierra Leone to Burkina Faso, feminism is the buzzword for a generation of women determined to change the course of the future for themselves and their families.
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