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Six Weeks to Save the World

24/02/2015

BBC Radio 4 - Ebola Junction

As the new Ebola treatment centre opens, Dr John Wright and his team record what happens.

Moyamba Junction is a key crossroads and one of the areas targeted in a bid to contain the spread of Ebola. Dr John Wright records what happens as the new treatment centre opens.

Dr Wright is one of the 30 NHS volunteers who set off for Sierra Leone in November. His took the decision to volunteer in the fight against Ebola after the United Nations warned that the world has just 60 days to get the virus under control or face an "unprecedented situation for which we don't have a plan" The report, issued by the organisation's health arm, said the virus was "running faster than us and it is winning the race."

The UN identified the opening of Ebola Treatment Centres and more effective community containment as key to success and in Bradford where Dr Wright is director of the Institute for Health Research, it was a rallying call that saw him immediately volunteer. He worked in southern Africa in the early 1990's, when HIV was endemic and has continued to visit. He's in charge of opening the Moyamba treatment centre: a million pound British Government funded hospital built by the Royal Engineers in just six weeks.

In this second programme in the series his recordings start at the December opening of the hospital. On day one three patients arrive: two of them exposed during a funeral. The young man, Ibrahim, seems the strongest and the team prepare to use the training they received in the York military barracks. His audio recordings take listeners onto the wards and through the last moments as Ibrahim loses his fight against the terrible disease. There's no time to take stock before more patients are arriving and throughout Christmas Dr Wright records what happens.

Working in the community is a key element of the job, with a major push to reinforce messages about safe burials and hand washing:
"One of the concerns with all of this is that we have this European army of clinicians going out all dressed up in scary protective equipment and it could be very alienating."

Professor Wright and the team get word that in a nearby area unsafe burials are still taking place: they travel there with the army and explain the dangers to local chiefs. On Christmas Eve the chiefs send him and the medical team a pig, which they can kill and feast on. But soon after this Dr Wright develops a temperature and is quickly on the other side of the "scary" bio hazard suits, where he remains in isolation awaiting the results of his own test for Ebola.

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