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As Ebola Surges In Sierra Leone, Communities Take Control

If you think the fight against Ebola is going well, here’s a grim new number: 537.

That’s how many new infections were reported in Sierra Leone in the past week. It’s the highest weekly tally in any country since the West African outbreak began.

International governments and aid groups have scrambled to open Ebola treatment centers in the country. But, because of safety concerns, many of these centers are accepting only a fraction of the number of patients they were built to serve.

n the meantime, most sick people are being directed to makeshift, government-run centers. Some of these are simply schools or other government buildings repurposed into a “community care center” — a place for people with Ebola symptomsto be isolated.

Baimaur Laminangbatu, who heads up a chiefdom of several hundred villages in Sierra Leone’s rural north, is helping transform a school into one of these care centers.

The facility is a lot more basic than the full-fledged treatment clinic down the street, which was built with funding from foreign governments, including the U.S. That facility has sophisticated in-ground plumbing and sanitation system.

Here at the school, workers are digging a big hole in the ground. “Those are the toilets for the suspected cases to use,” Laminangbatu says.

The treatment offered at the care center will be limited — medication to bring down a fever and rehydration salts that patients can drink with little help or supervision. In contrast, at some treatment centers, patients are getting intravenous drips for fluid replacements and sponge baths.

Continue reading.

Top Photo: A worker helps to build an addition onto an Ebola holding center in the Port Loko District of Sierra Leone.

Bottom left: A worker puts the finishing touches on the dividers that will separate patients at the community care center in the Port Loko District of Sierra Leone.

Bottom right: Aid workers with the nonprofit Partners In Health say there’s no time to build Ebola clinics from scratch. So the agency is transforming an existing holding center into a treatment facility with a high standard of care.