The West African nation of Mali, which just beat its first outbreak of Ebola, has confirmed a second one that is larger and more threatening, global health authorities said on Wednesday.
The victim who apparently began the new outbreak was an imam who fell ill in Guinea and traveled to Mali for better treatment at a major private clinic in Bamako, the capital.
The new cases will add to the mounting total of Ebola victims. In its last update on Nov. 5, the World Health Organization said there had been more than 13,000 confirmed or suspected cases in West Africa since the epidemic began. Some 5,000 people have died.
The imam died at the Pasteur Clinic in Bamako on Oct. 27. Because of his status, his body was washed at a large mosque and then returned to Guinea for burial after a funeral at another mosque.
The Pasteur Clinic failed to diagnose Ebola as the underlying cause of the kidney failure for which it was treating the imam. Kidney failure is a possible complication of late-stage Ebola.
The outbreak was only detected after a nurse at the clinic fell ill and died, and the chief W.H.O. representative in Mali heard from his counterparts in Guinea that members of the imam’s family were dying.
“It was a real failure by the clinic,” the W.H.O. representative, Dr. Ibrahima Soce Fall, said in a telephone interview.
Now, the clinic is closed and under quarantine — as are the mosque in Bamako, one or two other Malian clinics where the imam was treated, and the large family compound where the nurse lived.
Among the patients quarantined at the clinic are 10 United Nations peacekeepers stationed in Mali who were wounded in fighting in the north.
On Wednesday evening, the Malian health authorities confirmed that one of the clinic’s doctors also had Ebola.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/health/mali-reports-a-second-larger-ebola-outbreak.htmlThis is how it always starts. One person gets sick, no one figures out it is Ebola, and then it gets loose into the wild.
The only reason it didn't happen here is because we figured it out and stopped it at level 2 before it got beyond the healthcare workers which are almost always the second group infected after patient zero.
