Africa’s Village Healers Complicate Ebola Fight

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Tue, 2014-11-18 11:53 — mike kraft

In Sierra Leone, Traditional Treatments and Death of a Woman Who Resisted Outside Help Fostered Outbreak

WALL STREET JOURNAL Nov. 18, 2014
By Peter Wonacott
KAILAHUN, Sierra Leone—When a Red Cross volunteer visited this impoverished border district in mid-May to warn about the spread of Ebola, he faced a formidable adversary: the village healer.

A Liberian woman washes her hands from a bottle of chlorine-infused water to curb the spread of Ebola in Jene Wonde village. In Liberia’s capital Monrovia, another Ebola hot spot, healers offer their herbal-based remedies at so-called pharmacies, although in a nod to the epidemic there are now jugs of chlorinated water outside their doors. Meanwhile, Ebola has torn through the country’s Pentecostal churches, after pastors tried to heal by laying their hands on the ill. European Pressphoto Agency

Surbeh Alpha, the 25-year-old youth chairman of the Red Cross chapter in Kailahun, was advising residents to avoid contact with the sick and dead when the healer approached him. She had been treating patients coming from Guinea, rubbing tree-leaf mud packs on feverish bodies. Villagers, he learned, feared he and his colleagues had come to steal internal organs—a rumor health workers suspected she had cooked up to protect her business. Staring hard at Mr. Alpha, she challenged why he had come to the village....

Weeks later, the village healer was dead and the government of Sierra Leone...—where a surgeon contracted the disease and became the U.S.’s second fatality on Monday—had announced its own Ebola outbreak that stemmed from her funeral....

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http://online.wsj.com/articles/africas-village-healers-complicate-ebola-fight-1416268426

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