Ebola epidemic decimating nurses, health and aid workers in Guinea

Working at breakneck speed, the nurses rush between departments at Guinea’s largest hospital, wearing gloves they have bought at their own expense to protect themselves against the Ebola virus.

The often chronically under-resourced staff of Donka hospital in the capital Conakry - like health workers across west Africa - sacrifice everything in the battle against a deadly epidemic, often their own lives.

The World Health Organization said last week that more than 120 health workers across the region had died during the ‘unprecedented’ outbreak which began early this year, and more than 240 had been infected.

‘The outbreak of Ebola virus disease in west Africa is unprecedented in many ways, including the high proportion of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers who have been infected,’ the agency said in a statement.

The toll on health workers is all the more the more devastating in the three worst-hit nations - Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone - where more than 1,500 people have died and where there are just one or two doctors for every 100,000 people. Sierra Leone, which had already lost its only virologist and other senior medics, reported the death of a third physician last week.

A Senegalese WHO expert was also infected in Sierra Leone and was admitted on Wednesday to a hospital in the German city of Hamburg.

‘One day, if God lets me live, when Ebola becomes a distant memory, I will explain to my grandchildren or great-grandchildren that this disease called Ebola shook the world in 2014,’ says Marie Fikhe, a nurse in charge of a department at Donka hospital. 

She is interrupted by ambulance sirens announcing the admission of a new case of Ebola, a fever which has killed more than half the people it has infected and is passed on via contact with bodily fluids. ‘After every task, you have to change gloves and wash your hands, yet we are only given one pack a week, which is insufficient,’ says Fikhe.