Sierra Leone native describes ravages of Ebola

At left, Alice Bernard-Jones gives a presentation on the outbreak of Ebola to several dozen members of Grace Episcopal Church Sunday morning.
At left, Alice Bernard-Jones gives a presentation on the outbreak of Ebola to several dozen members of Grace Episcopal Church Sunday morning.

A native of Sierra Leone, the one country in Africa that hasn't contained the recent Ebola pandemic, gave a presentation on the deadly disease at a Grace Episcopal Church forum Sunday morning.

Alice Bernard-Jones told several dozen attendees that the disease is believed to have first surfaced in 1976, and has ravaged "three of the poorest countries in the world" - Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia.

Last year's outbreak was the largest ever for the virus, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC). It says the disease is spread through direct contact with blood and body fluids, but not spread through the air, water, food or mosquitoes. The CDC says the risk of an outbreak affecting multiple people in the U.S. is very low.

At first, Bernard-Jones said, Africans thought the disease was malaria, diarrhea or cholera, but that "people realized this was different" when victims began to bleed profusely.

The World Health Organization provided logistical and technical support, but did not quickly enough grasp the seriousness of the threat.

Bernard-Jones said part of the problem stems from Africans' lack of knowledge about how the disease spreads, and about modern medicine in general.

She said some family members would smuggle their loved ones who had the disease out of hospitals, because they thought they weren't being treated when, in fact, the patients were in isolation.

Many Africans also prepare their dead for burial by washing the bodies, but that also spread the disease, which is spread by any bodily fluids, including sweat.

Since the disease was different from any other that the Africans had seen, some thought it was a curse and took their sick loved ones to witch doctors rather than medical doctors.

In response to a question, she said that survivors build antibodies that prevent them from getting the virus for a decade.

She said the spread of the virus has stopped in Guinea and Liberia, but not Sierra Leone.

On Jan. 3, the outbreak has 21,097 reported cases, resulting in 8,293 deaths. "But all is not lost. People are being cured," she said.

She said some 100-200 residents of Jefferson City are Sierra Leone natives like herself.