• Sierra Leone Cancels Public Christmas, New Year's Celebrations to Curtail Ebola

    Only about 10 percent of all people who are living in Sierra Leone are Christians who will be celebrating this holiday season, but the government has already put necessary restrictions on the festivities due to the continuing Ebola outbreak. Sierra Leone is now the hardest-hit country, surpassing the illness and death that even Liberia has seen, and its leaders are scrambling to find ways to keep Ebola from spreading. That has led them to determine that public Christmas and New Year's celebrations are now banned. People are now forbidden from gathering in groups to celebrate as they normally would. Military personnel will once again take to the streets to make sure that groups of revelers are not gathering together, which would basically intensify the risk of spreading the virus to each other. This is just one more way the everyday lives of the people of West Africa have been disrupted by this epidemic. As of Dec. 10, Sierra Leone had recorded 8,000 cases of Ebola and nearly 1,900 deaths. In West Africa as a whole, more than 18,000 people have been infected, resulting in more than 6,500 deaths. Those numbers are pretty harrowing, but the truth is many at the World Health Organization feared they would be far higher by now.

  • Epicenter for Ebola Has Moved to Liberian Community of Jene-Wonde

    While the United States seems to have managed to prevent an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus — at least for now — people in West Africa are still suffering. A man traveled from a large Liberian city to the small community of Jene-Wonde in Grand Cape Mount County, bringing with him his sick daughter. Within days the man and his family had died, triggering one of the worst Ebola outbreaks so far. Jene-Wonde is near the border of Sierra Leone and is currently considered to be the epicenter of the deadly disease, according to the Associated Press. The community is extremely small with absolutely no established health care. That means that the leaders of the area have no idea how to handle the crisis. They realize that surrounding communities are afraid of them, so rather than initially inviting skilled teams in to help with the dead and sanitize the area, they instead tried to hide the outbreak by burying the dead in ways that ultimately helped spread the virus. Now as many as 10 percent of the community has been infected, and there is a realistic fear that if the Ebola virus is not contained, then everyone will succumb to it.
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