Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organisation, 2012. Wikicommons/ DFID. Some rights reserved.In July last year, a woman appeared in the main market square of Kenema – a remote diamond-prospecting town in southeastern Sierra Leone – and began ranting about ‘sinister’ goings-on at the local public hospital. Claiming she was a nurse, the woman told the townspeople she had seen doctors injecting patients with Ebola. It was all part of a plot, she said, to introduce the virus to Sierra Leone, thereby fomenting an emergency that would bring humanitarian aid flooding to the country for the benefit of the political elite in Freetown.
At a time when the source of Ebola was uncertain even to western scientists, and rumours abounded about the ‘true’ intentions of foreign medical teams dressed in scary biohazard suits, the woman’s claims found a receptive audience and soon an angry mob was laying siege to Kenema General Hospital, forcing nursing staff to suspend vital care and barricade the gates.
