Ebola Epidemic Takes a Toll on Sierra Leone’s Surgeons

Twenty percent of the nation’s surgical practitioners have been killed by Ebola

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN  by Seema Yasmin and Chethan Sathya                                   Jan. 22, 2015

Thaim Kamara is 60 years old and would like to retire this year. But he is one of only eight remaining surgeons in Sierra Leone, a west African country of about six million people. Kamara lost two friends to Ebola in 2014—Martin Salia and Thomas Rogers, fellow surgeons at Connaught Hospital in the capital, Freetown. In light of the dire circumstances, Kamara has postponed his plan to retire.

Although the rate of new Ebola infections in Sierra Leone, along with neighboring countries Guinea and Liberia, is finally falling, more than 800 health care personnel have been infected with Ebola in the hot zone and nearly 500 have died since the epidemic began, according to a January report by the World Health Organization. And the toll, along with the continuing deaths of health care workers will have devastating implications for the long-term health of these nations. Credit: CDC Global via Flickr

... Surgical care in Sierra Leone is now at a standstill, says Andy Leather, director of the King’s Centre for Global Health... There are nearly no elective or emergency surgeries in the country because of a lack of surgeons, he says. And some surgeons—aware that their risk of contracting Ebola is 100 times higher than that for the general population—are scared to operate.

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