A member of the diaspora, Dr Mosoka Fallah returns to join the fight against an epidemic.The NYTimes reports:
More hereMonths into the Ebola outbreak, Liberia remains desperately short on everything needed to halt the rise in deaths and infections — burial teams for the dead, ambulances for the sick, treatment centers for patients, gloves for doctors and nurses. But it is perhaps shortest on something intangible: the trust needed to stop the disease from spreading.
Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
Dr. Fallah, an epidemiologist and immunologist who grew up in Monrovia’s poorest neighborhoods before studying at Harvard, has been crisscrossing the capital in a race to repair that rift. Neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, shack by shack, he is battling the disease across this crowded capital, seeking the cooperation of residents who are deeply distrustful of the government and its faltering response to the deadliest Ebola epidemic ever recorded.
“If people don’t trust you, they can hide a body, and you’ll never know,” Dr. Fallah said. “And Ebola will keep spreading. They’ve got to trust you, but we don’t have the luxury of time.”
With his experience straddling vastly different worlds, Dr. Fallah acts as a rare bridge: between community leaders and the Health Ministry, where he is an unpaid adviser; between the government and international organizations, which have the money to back his efforts.
But the scale of the task is daunting. He is trying to beat Ebola in a city of 1.5 million people where the disease is expanding exponentially, where entire families search in vain for medical care, and where the main hospital is dangerously overwhelmed, plagued by electrical fires, floods and the deaths of health workers infected with the disease.
