Ebola spreads in remote Liberian towns

JENEWONDE, Liberia – A schoolteacher brought his sick daughter from Liberia’s capital to this small town of 300 people. Soon he and his entire family were dead and buried in the forest nearby, along with an increasing number of residents.

The community of Jenewonde has become a new hotspot for the Ebola outbreak in Liberia. With cases on the decline in the capital, officials must now turn their attention to hard-to-reach places where the disease is flaring.

Jenewonde, in Grand Cape Mount County near the border with Sierra Leone, has reportedly lost about 10 percent of its population to Ebola since late September. Markets and farms nearby have been abandoned.

Momo Sheriff, who lost his son to Ebola, said there is no health care in the community. No clinics could be seen along the road into town.

“If the government does not take action, everybody will die in this town,” Sheriff told an Associated Press journalist. “We are burying two dead bodies today. We don’t know who it will be tomorrow. Every day we have to cry.”

Juma Mansaray lost her mother and grandmother on the same day. She said the community has been ostracized from neighboring ones.

“Everywhere we go, the people will drive us away,” she said. “We can’t even go to the local market to buy pepper or food because people think we are cursed.”

Ebola is also hitting the town of Gorzohn in Rivercess County, which lies on Liberia’s central coast, said Assistant Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah, who heads Liberia’s Ebola response.

The international response must adapt to this new phase, Doctors Without Borders warned. As Jenewonde saw, just one case can ignite a chain of transmission that leads to a dozen more infections, said Fasil Tezera, head of operations for the charity in Liberia.

Liberia has suffered the greatest death toll in the Ebola epidemic, with 2,766 deaths blamed on the first-ever Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The World Health Organization says that after months of aggressive efforts to isolate the sick and remove bodies of victims safely, Ebola appears to be declining in some parts of Liberia, including the capital where only about 50 of the 250 beds are filled at a Doctors Without Borders clinic.