Guest Post by MedSend-supported doctor
Viral Hemorrahagic Fever Has Come to Ethiopia
It has been a truly stressful season in Ethiopia. We were coming off a stretch of hosting many visitors and the normal pressure of busy hospital work, when on November 11 my house worker informed me that her neighbor had died suddenly. He was a newly graduated doctor working at a local hospital for only 1 month. She went to the funeral service as is her obligation as part of the local customs.
In the next days, it came to light that her neighbor was part of the team that was taking care of a patient with Marburg disease. The Marburg virus is in the same family as Ebola. It causes a severe hemorrhagic fever that leads to death in 50-90% of cases. Only a few dozen outbreaks have happened over the past 40 years, but the results are always tragic. Ethiopia has never faced an outbreak of Marburg or Ebola before.
The next five days are a blur to me. We prepared as much as we could for the possibility of Marburg patients coming to our hospital. We purchased tents, upgraded our cholera and Covid isolation space to be fit for the new outbreak. We closed non-essential services. We started pre-triage screening. We counted and organized PPE. We contacted Samaritan’s Purse and asked them to send help. We organized the Samaritan’s Purse team trip, and we prayed! I didn’t eat or sleep much with all these preparations.
For our family, we had further decisions to make. Non-essential workers and volunteers at the hospital were being asked to leave by their organizations. Was it safe for our family to remain? Our family had plans to travel to a nearby city for our kids to participate in the annual “Field Day” at the international school. We chose to come and give the kids their opportunities to participate in the events for which they had trained.
Then we had to make the next hard decision for our family… do we stay in the neighboring city or return to our hospital. With an upcoming international neonatal conference on December 4-6, we decided to stay for the next 2 weeks, participate in the conference, and re-evaluate the situation.
I think I personally have cried every single day since the announcement of the outbreak. Tears over the loss of life from Marburg, tears of the loss of life from those too afraid to seek medical care for non-Marburg disease, tears over the loss of normalcy for our kids, tears over the risk of disease for my friends and colleagues, tears of how the hospital is going to be able to pay salaries in an already difficult economic climate in Ethiopia with the extra expenses and reduced income, tears of fatigue, and tears of sadness and loss.
Please pray for us, pray for Ethiopia, pray for the physicians at our hospital and all over the country, pray for the government response, pray for my family.
Romans 8:26: In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.
Photos provided by MedSend-supported Doctor
