Sharon Ekambaram is head of a human rights unit at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) – Doctors Without Borders in English – and is acting as the liaison officer co-ordinating the responses between the disease-hit country’s health department and the medical NGO, which is leading treatment in west Africa. Meanwhile, four South African experts from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases are camped nearby in Freetown, processing up to 150 blood samples every 48 hours, to identify patients who require strict isolation nursing and treatment. In a letter this week, the team’s leader, Professor Janusz Paweska, said the local electricity supply was so unreliable at maintaining the “negative pressure” biosafety chamber they work in that they needed to ship a generator out from South Africa. He added: “Specimens from suspected [Ebola cases are] often packed in improvised secondary containers.”
Paweska said that, last week, the “proudly South African” team were visited by Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma and that guards armed with automatic rifles guard their lab. Ekambaram, a veteran Aids treatment activist, is currently the sole South African field worker on the front lines of the epidemic, after three others returned last month.
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