Recovery

Children wash their hands before entering a classroom in Gueckedou - Photo: Jennifer Lazuta

irinnews.org - by Jennifer Lazuta

GUECKEDOU, 13 May 2015 (IRIN) - “Life is back to normal, but everything has changed,” said 30-year-old Yawa Keterine Camara as she slowly stirred a boiling cauldron of sauce outside her mud-brick home in southeastern Guinea. “I live again like before, but nothing is quite the same.”

Camara, who lost her husband to Ebola in November, said her life, like many, many other Guineans, is now divided in two: pre-Ebola and post-Ebola, the before and after.

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Médecins Sans Frontières                                     April 13, 2015

Dr Maria Barstch spends her days in the small house that serves as MSF’s Ebola survivor clinic in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The peak of the epidemic may have passed in Sierra Leone but new cases continue to emerge almost every day, and with new cases come new survivors. While they are relieved to have defeated the deadly virus, some survivors are facing other debilitating symptoms of the so called “post-Ebola syndrome.”

                   People wait for a consultation at MSF’s survivor clinic in Freetown. Photo: Sophie McNamara/MSF

...MSF has also opened a survivor clinic in Liberia, housed at the site of MSF’s new pediatric hospital in Monrovia. In both Liberia and Sierra Leone, many survivors have previously sought treatment at local public or private hospitals and clinics but were refused care as soon as staff knew they were Ebola survivors.

africa.undp.org - February 27, 2015

CLICK HERE - STUDY - CONFRONTING THE GENDER IMPACT OF EBOLA VIRUS DISEASE IN GUINEA, LIBERIA, AND SIERRA LEONE (9 page .PDF report)

Women need to be at the center of all efforts to help Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone recover from the Ebola crisis, according to a study by UNDP.

The epidemic has affected women disproportionately because of the essential role they play as caretakers, health personnel, farmers and small traders. For instance, as of December 2014, women represented 62 percent of the sick in Guéckédou, Guinea where the epidemic first appeared, and up to 74 percent in Télémilé, north of the capital Conakry.

“Buried in the aggregated impact is the plight of Ebola’s voiceless victims and agents of change—women and children,” say the authors of the study, adding that “Ebola response and recovery, and national development strategies must be gender-sensitive in addressing the associated negative impacts on women and girls.”

The Nebraska Biocontainment Unit (NBU), located at the Nebraska Medical Center, has shared its protocol for Ebola patient discharge, handling a patient's body after death and environmental disinfection in the March issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).

Discharge process for a patient treated for EVD