By: Dr. Florence Baingana

What struck me today was the many stories that I heard. These included people who have a sick person, they call for them to be collected, and they are not collected, until the person dies. Issues around this include whether to advise them on how to protect themselves or if this will lead to more infections, since they may not know how to remove the gloves without infecting themselves. On the one hand, people in the communities are advised not to have contact with a person who is sick, especially the fluids from the person, but if it takes many days with no response, sometimes it is inevitable that they have to provide whatever help that they can. One story is of a husband who called the Response Team, they came and looked and said yes, it could be Ebola, but we shall be back and they did not come back. The husband then had to look after his wife, until she died. So he had to do the best he could, mixing Clorox with water and disinfecting as often as possible.