It isn't just the Chinese and the African witch doctors who are practicing voodoo medicine. Our own brand of faith healers exist as well, and the consequences of their ignorance can be just as deadly. Note below.
Moral of the story - ignorance kills.
- Bill
WSJ wrote: Africa’s Village Healers Complicate Ebola Fight
In Sierra Leone, Traditional Treatments and Death of a Woman Who Resisted Outside Help Fostered Outbreak
By PETER WONACOTT
Nov. 17, 2014 6:53 p.m. ET
KAILAHUN, Sierra Leone—When a Red Cross volunteer visited this impoverished border district in mid-May to warn about the spread of Ebola, he faced a formidable adversary: the village healer.
Surbeh Alpha, the 25-year-old youth chairman of the Red Cross chapter in Kailahun, was advising residents to avoid contact with the sick and dead when the healer approached him. She had been treating patients coming from Guinea, rubbing tree-leaf mud packs on feverish bodies. Villagers, he learned, feared he and his colleagues had come to steal internal organs—a rumor health workers suspected she had cooked up to protect her business. Staring hard at Mr. Alpha, she challenged why he had come to the village.
“We’re doing Ebola sensitization,” he replied.
“That’s what I’m doing,” she retorted, Mr. Alpha recounted. “You are just telling lies.”
Weeks later, the village healer was dead and the government of Sierra Leone—where a surgeon contracted the disease and became the U.S.’s second fatality on Monday—had announced its own Ebola outbreak that stemmed from her funeral, according to local health workers and a paper later published in Science. The death of the healer, whom another local health worker identified as Finda Mendenor, created a viral trail that spilled into Kenema, the country’s third-largest city, before moving into the crowded capital of Freetown.
Kailahun became a microcosm for all that can go wrong in trying to contain Ebola, but it has since become a template for what can also go right, after officials and health workers got residents to change behavior, accept modern medicine and break a chain of deadly infections.
An important part of that work has zeroed in on dispelling rumors and debunking miracle cures health workers say Ms. Mendenor peddled in the village of Kpondu, the suspected source of Sierra Leone’s outbreak. The resistance they met from villagers underscores a little-understood dynamic in the Ebola epidemic: Healers in parts of Africa—both herbal and faith-based— are often more highly regarded than those who come to promote more unfamiliar forms of medical care.
In that credibility gap, Ebola has flourished.
In Guinea, where the most recent epidemic originated, the 61-year-old doctor who heads the country’s Ebola response recently had to dissuade a delegation of traditional healers against using their formula for fighting the lethal virus: plants, roots and tree bark. Six healers have caught Ebola treating patients there, and three have died. In a compromise, Sakoba Keita told the delegation his agency would clear the delivery of traditional medications to Ebola treatment centers as long as he and his cohort allowed regular doctors to decide whether the products could be administered safely.
“I don’t think tree bark has been tested on mice,” Dr. Keita joked dryly.
In Liberia’s capital Monrovia, another Ebola hot spot, healers offer their herbal-based remedies at so-called pharmacies, although in a nod to the epidemic there are now jugs of chlorinated water outside their doors. Meanwhile, Ebola has torn through the country’s Pentecostal churches, after pastors tried to heal by laying their hands on the ill.
In one church just outside the capital of Monrovia, Ebola killed a pastor, his wife, an assistant pastor, his wife, and a prayer leader, as well as a pastor from a neighboring church who stopped by to try and heal them, said Rev. Kortu Koilor, the church’s only surviving leader, and a part-time health worker, who put a stop to the laying of hands on the sick.
In Kailahun, the Sierra Leone district bordering Guinea, locals blamed a rising death toll on witchcraft and organ harvesting, but spread risk by secretly cleaning and burying diseased corpses at night to usher them into the afterlife.
But now, the district is averaging new cases in the low single digits, according to estimates from Amanda McClelland, a senior Emergency Health official for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, down from a peak of about 350 cases a week in early August.
But Ebola is spreading elsewhere in Sierra Leone, showing how officials continue to wage the same battles in remote rural places.
“We have seen a massive reduction in what used to be the epicenter,” said retired Maj. Palo Conteh, chief executive of the newly created National Ebola Response Center told reporters on Oct. 29. “Whatever support is provided from United Nations, China, Cuba, you name it—the best facilities from U.K. and U.S.—if we don’t change our attitudes we will all be wasting our time.”
A new outbreak has surfaced in what was the country’s last Ebola-free district, Koinadugu, where more than 30 people have died from the virus since mid-October following unsafe burials, according to Sidie Yahya Tunis, head of communications for the National Ebola Response Center.
In October, the World Health Organization said it hoped to begin testing Ebola vaccines this year in a step toward rolling out mass inoculations. But the success of any vaccination campaign will hinge on local communities accepting how the disease surfaced in the first place. That has proved tough in places like Kailahun—where literacy is low, poverty high and ancient rituals bind together generations.
“It’s a virus—not witchcraft, not a conspiracy. All those things halted our progress,” said Joseph Bresee, head of the Sierra Leone Ebola response team for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “It’s hard to allay fear.”
Sierra Leone isn’t the only place where culture and conspiracy have clashed with efforts to fight disease.
Scientists scoured the villages of Papua New Guinea to teach cannibals the links between Kuru, a neurological disorder, and the consumption of human brains. Muslims who believe antipolio vaccines are a plot to sterilize them have stymied global vaccination campaigns. And Ebola spread in Sierra Leone in part because of common burial practices with its neighbors, Guinea and Liberia.
Six countries, including the U.S. and Spain, are currently fighting Ebola outbreaks. But nearly all of the more than 5,100 deaths have been in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Porous borders leave Sierra Leone vulnerable. Civil war came to the country through Liberia, sweeping up children in a conflict that killed an estimated 50,000 people between and 1991 and 2002. The Ebola outbreak this year in Guinea appears to have originated near the border town of Guéckédou, an area where people hunt bats, a suspected host for the virus, said Michel Van Herp, an epidemiologist with the humanitarian group, Doctors Without Borders.
After the Guinea outbreak, Eric Moosa, health superintendent for the Kailahun district, scoured the Internet to understand how the disease was transmitted. He and other officials held cross-border meetings to learn how it spread. They also implored the district’s chiefs to tell villagers not to touch the sick or dead who may carry the virus.
Disseminating information turned out to be the easy part. Far harder was getting locals to accept it.
Soon after Mr. Alpha and his team from the district capital of Kailahun arrived in mid-May with their police escort, the local chief asked them to leave. The health workers were rumored to be peddling blood and body organs to foreigners.
“You want to kill my people,” the chief told the health workers, said Mr. Alpha, the Red Cross youth leader.
Beside the chief, said Mr. Alpha, was a woman of high standing in the community, the healer, Ms. Mendenor. Sulaiman Kanneh Saidu, a community health officer in nearby Koindu who knew Ms. Mendenor, said he suspects she spread rumors about organ-harvesting health workers to boost her healing business. Soon she developed a high fever, but died before being tested for Ebola.
Health workers now say her funeral served as ground zero for Sierra Leone’s epidemic.
Local women washed her body and some lay on top of the corpse in the hope “that her power would transfer to them,” said Mr. Moosa, the Kailahun health official.
Women who attended the funeral later showed up sick at the local clinic in Koindu, staffed by Mr. Saidu. His nurse, Messah Kone, fell ill and died on May 23. Two days later, a lab in Kenema confirmed she had tested positive for Ebola. The government of Sierra Leone notified the World Health Organization of an Ebola outbreak centered in Kailahun district.
When Mr. Moosa and health workers returned to the area to warn locals, villagers threw rocks at their vehicles, shattering windshields of two cars, he said. Fresh rumors had surfaced of an invisible plane full of witches that had crashed in the area, allowing a deadly disease to seep from the wreckage.Parents and grandparents fled with sick children to other villages, spreading the contagion.
“People were dying indiscriminately,” said Mr. Moosa. “Had they not been in denial, we would have stopped everything.”
By late June, Kailahun got help when Doctors Without Borders opened an Ebola clinic in the district. The so-called Case Management Center immediately filled to capacity, said Will Turner, project coordinator in Kailahun for Doctors Without Borders.
Among an early batch of patients was the Koindu community health officer, Mr. Saidu, who had picked up the virus after handling a protective suit he had discarded. He recovered, but said his absence back in Koindu “left a huge vacuum.”
Part of the response to the outbreak, though, was a surge in community activism that began to erode the rumors around Ebola and misperceptions about modern medicine. The local Red Cross chapter in Kailahun recruited more than 150 volunteers to take these and other messages into the district’s most remote reaches, including the borderlands.
The community teams taught children to sing songs about washing hands four times a day; another was about not eating uncooked meat. The Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders trained locals how to trace potential contacts of confirmed Ebola cases and safely dispose of bodies.
Bockarie Morqui, 24, said his family asked him to move out after he joined a safe-burial team. Others resigned after their training because of the stigma of handling the dead. But showing up in villages with protective suits was the best visual aid to convey the seriousness of their message about Ebola.
“Every time we go out, we explain,” he said. “Don’t touch the body.”
By September, the cumulative efforts cut the case load in Kailahun substantially, even as it began to bulge in other parts of the country. By October, many of the new suspected Ebola patients at the clinic were coming from outside the district.
For Mr. Alpha, the clearest sign of a change of heart in Kailahun came when he returned recently to Kpondu, where he first encountered the late healer. The chief who had ordered him to leave the village had also died. But another village elder rushed up to welcome him.
“Let the medical people come,” the Red Cross worker said he was told. “We are not denying it anymore.”
—David Gauthier-Villars
in Conakry, Guinea,
and Drew Hinshaw
in Monrovia, Liberia,
contributed to this article.
Write to Peter Wonacott at peter.wonacott@wsj.com