Outbreak: The truth about Ebola.

Hard-hitting documentary looking at the facts surrounding the recent outbreak of Ebola. We hear movingly from the village in Guinea where the infection is known to have first struck the family of Emile Ouamouna in December 2013. By March 2014 the virus had travelled hundreds of miles and killed fifty people. Dr Lamine Koivogui, Director of the Guinea Institute of Public Health was brought in to assess the situation - there is a harrowing film of his visit to a boy with a mystery illness. Koivogui took blood samples and isolated the virus as ebola. A field hospital was set up by MSF in the centre of the outbreak; it was felt that the sick should be isolated, the dead should be carefully buried and the vulnerable monitored. The WHO were alerted - Dr Keiji Fukuda, Assistant Director-General for Health Security for WHO admits to how unready they were for the extent of the spread. Head of the Ebola Mission for MSF, Marc Poncin, describes the daily meetings that took place in which no decisions were made and he felt that the WHO downplayed the situation continuously. As MSF feared, Ebola hit the capital of Guinea and MSF went public in April 2014, naming it as an epidemic but were curbed from further action by the Government. Soon after, Ebola spread to Sierra Leone where, tragically, the disease killed a well-known healer called Mendinor whose funeral was attended by hundreds, spreading the disease far and wide. The Government, advised by Metabiota, then made the decision to treat Ebola victims at the state hospital in Kenema but this back-fired and spread rather than contained the problem. By June the epidemic was in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia and was recognised as the largest Ebola outbreak the world had ever seen. The WHO still did not declare it to be a potentially international crisis even though at least eight hundred people had now died. Finally, after an infected Liberian travelled to Nigeria, the WHO declared the outbreak of Ebola as being a national crisis. Samuel Tarplah, Head Nurse at West Point Holding Center, an isolation clinic set up for Ebola victims in Monrovia, describes how local villagers raided it, dragging out sick and dead bodies, further contaminating themselves; eventually the sick were left to live on the streets. After Tom Frieden travelled from the US to assess the situation in Monrovia and insisted on immediate support, ten months after the start of the outbreak, a worldwide fight against the disease finally began. This, coupled with changing behaviour towards nursing the sick and burial rituals, finally slowed down the spread of the disease. Officially 10,000 people died but unofficially the number is thought to be much larger.