fb-pixelDoctor returns to slums of his youth to defuse the Ebola time bomb - The Boston Globe Skip to main content

Doctor returns to slums of his youth to defuse the Ebola time bomb

Dr. Mosoka Fallah (center) is supervising surveillance teams working to contain the epidemic in Monrovia. Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times

MONROVIA, Liberia — The girl in the pink shirt lay motionless on a sidewalk, flat on her stomach, an orange drink next to her, unfinished. People gathered on the other side of the street, careful to keep their distance.

Dr. Mosoka Fallah waded in. Details about the girl spilled out of the crowd in a dizzying torrent, gaining urgency with the siren of an approaching ambulance. The girl’s mother had died, almost certainly of Ebola. So had three other relatives.

The girl herself was sick. The girl’s aunt, unable to get help, had left her on the sidewalk in despair. Other family members may have been infected. Still others had fled across this city.

Advertisement



Fallah, 44, calmly instructed leaders of the neighborhood — known as Capitol Hill, previously untouched by Ebola — how to deal with the family and protect their community. He promised to return later that day and send more help in the morning. His words quelled the crowd, for the moment.

“This is a horrific case,” he said as he walked away. “It could be the start of a big one right here. It’s a ticking time bomb.”

Months into the Ebola outbreak, Liberia remains desperately short on everything needed to halt the rise in deaths and infections — burial teams for the dead, ambulances for the sick, treatment centers for patients, gloves for doctors and nurses. But it is perhaps shortest on something intangible: the trust needed to stop the disease from spreading.

Fallah, an epidemiologist and immunologist who grew up in Monrovia’s poorest neighborhoods before studying at Harvard University, has been crisscrossing the capital in a race to repair that rift.

Neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, shack by shack, Fallah is battling the disease across this crowded capital, seeking the cooperation of residents who are deeply distrustful of the government and its faltering response to the deadliest Ebola epidemic ever recorded.

Advertisement



“If people don’t trust you, they can hide a body, and you’ll never know,” Fallah said. “And Ebola will keep spreading. They’ve got to trust you, but we don’t have the luxury of time.”

Ebola has been blamed for 2,400 deaths in West Africa, according to the World Health Organization. Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea have recorded the vast majority of cases

In Monrovia, Fallah is trying to beat Ebola in a city of 1.5 million people where the disease is expanding exponentially.

Fallah has slowly begun winning over the city’s toughest neighborhood, West Point, the seaside slum where he spent two years of his childhood.

He decided with community leaders to battle Ebola by resurrecting a survival mechanism used during Liberia’s catastrophic 14-year civil war.

They divided West Point into zones. Surveillance teams of volunteers overseen by Fallah now scour West Point, searching for information about a dead or sick person, hoping to identify victims and remove the bodies before the disease can be passed on.

His teams visit every morning, tracing the circle of people around Ebola victims to see who else develops fevers or starts vomiting. This painstaking process, repeated until an outbreak is eventually contained, has extinguished past Ebola outbreaks in rural Africa — and may be the only hope of stopping it now.

“Dr. Fallah has taken the situation in West Point as if he were living here,” said Kenneth Martu, a political organizer in West Point. “We can say openly: Had he not been here, things would have gotten far worse.”

Advertisement