Ebola spreads ‘like a brush fire’

Caritas Internationalis led a meeting in Rome on Tuesday to discuss how best to coordinate the response from across the world to the ebola crisis in West Africa, that has claimed 5,000 lives with 13,000 people infected.

The meeting included reports from the field via remote partici­pation from Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Dr Timothy Flanigan, a professor of infectious disease medicine in the US, who is also a permanent deacon for his parish in Rhode Island, addressed the meeting after two months training health-care workers in Liberia. Representatives from religious orders serving in West Africa also attended.

“Think of ebola as a brush fire. A spark here and there, which is each new case, can cause a new outbreak, or can be put out,” Dr Flanigan explained. “If the wind blows in a certain way, you’ve got a wildfire. The most important thing is the community understanding and responding, so we can break the chain of infection,” he said. “There must be trust, and this is where the Church is so ­critical. If you don’t have trust, people will hide the sick. They’ll hide the bodies.”

Dr Flanigan and others are working with the World Health Organisation and local Catholic clinics to identify separate isolation areas for ebola patients. He also helps train health-care workers to triage all medical patients and screen them for ebola.

Caritas speakers who called into the conference from Sierra Leone mentioned ongoing problems with safe burial and the need to have a religious figure present, if only at a distance. “Some families believe organs are being illegally harvested,” said Edward John-Bull of Caritas Sierra Leone.  Having a priest or imam watch the burial team, and then offer pastoral counselling to the bereaved, can prevent families from hiding bodies or bribing health teams to change the official cause of death. Fr Aristelo Miranda, a Camillian father who visited Sierra Leone recently, said  overcrowding is a major issue. “I’ve seen quarantined families with 10 or 15 people in one house,” he said, adding that the food provided to quarantined families is often insufficient.

Sr Barbara Brillant FMM, calling in from Liberia, and Dr Flanigan discussed fears of social instability given the rising prices of staple foods such as rice and cooking oil. “We’re talking about a health situation but also about a humanitarian crisis,” said Neil Casey of Cafod. “As the needs change, we may need to focus on food and livelihoods.”