The article that I read was about the Ebola outbreak in Liberia and how many more people are getting contaminated than should be getting contaminated because proper measures are not being taken. In Liberia, many people are getting Ebola, and then people are caring for them, which only infects them. When people do go to hospitals, they are turned away more times than not because the hospital is full of infected people already. Even though people are urged to report the sick, many are not because they do not trust the doctors and hospital workers as a result of them turning away infected patients.
Dr. Mosoka Fallah, who used to live in Liberia as a child, is working to take necessary measures to minimize infection. He has employed a tactic that has worked to stop previous outbreaks of diseases in Liberia. He is employing this tactic in the slum neighborhood of West Point, where he lived for two years as a child. He has split West Point into zones, and along with a surveillance team of volunteers, has been moving through the slums, collecting information about sick or dead people. They are then moving the bodies out of the area so that no one else is infected by these people. So far, the strategy has been working.
This article shows three affects of the Ebola virus on society. One affect is that people in Liberia are starting to trust doctors less and less. This is because they are not getting the care that they need and they are getting turned away at hospitals. Liberians are not taking the doctors’ advice to isolate the sick, and they are still going near them, causing them to get infected. Another affect of the Ebola virus is that doctors are taking a different role in society, and people are volunteering in dangerous circumstances to help other people. For example, Dr. Mosoka Fallah is organizing the volunteer surveillance teams, and searching for sick and dead people himself. Doctors do not traditionally look for the sick, they wait of the sick to come to them. Also, the volunteer surveillance teams are risking possible infection when they are searching for the sick or dead. This affects society because it is helping Liberians isolate the sick and dead so that more people do not get infected. If it weren’t for the volunteers and doctors like Dr. Mosoka Fallah organizing them, many more Liberians would probably be infected.
There are many things that I think improve this article. One question I have is have the doctors in Liberia tried any tactics other than Dr. Fallah’s or just telling Liberians to isolate the ill? If they have, what are they? Another question I have is what is the rest of the world doing about this outbreak, and why aren’t there improvised hospitals of clinics for the sick in Liberia? Are the WHO or UN doing anything about this? If so, what? These are the questions that might improve this article, even though it is detailed and well written as it is.
Posted for W. Bogatyrenko
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