Family trust. Supporting trustworthy journalism that informs and inspires. And by the frontline journalism fund, with major support from jon and jo ann hagler. I got a call saying that there is a walker on his way i could hear and see trowde of peoplscreaming and shouting. people shouting e i can see thats afraid. Ic i see he hasked up a rock d hes waving it around. By hes followed lot of people, telling us,. Ou have to take him down he is infecting our mmunity. Oi dont know where hes g. shouting continues the pressure from the crowd is mounting. Theyre yelling at us. G so theuys in the suits wrestleto the ground and lift himof into the bac the pickup. Wa it was liktching a zombie movie or something. Its just crazy, its pure craziness. Where am i . How did i end up here . Was this just a bad eam . Buno, it wasnt. It was for real. Narrator in december 2013, the children of meliandou village discovered hundreds of e. Ts nesting in a hollow t they had no idea that deadly virus. Ected of carrying nobody knows for sure but the villagers now think this is where it all began thuer rumbling narrator nobody knew what had killed oneyearold emile oumanou. Ed oneyearold emile his sister died nine days later. Then his mother fell ill. She was seven months pregnant. Healer gathered everyoonal amgether, including more fy members who had beco sick. A villager filmed the ceremony on his cell phone. Narrator the next victim, emiles grandmother, left the village to seek treatment. A she infected a nurlocal hospital. The sickness began to spreadre across the forgion of guinea, but for three mohs was mistaken forholera and malaria. By march, the virus had traveled hundreds of miles and killed more than 50 people. The government sent a team of scientists to investigate and take blood samples. Narrator the doctor tracked down a teenager named khalil, who was sick with the mystery disease. His colleague started filming on an ipad. moaning narrator khalils bloodte would labe tested. The results ebola. Ar ntor the government of guineaad no idea how to respond. All previous Ebola Outbreaks had occurred over 1,000 miles away. But the relief Group Doctors without borders has decades of experience with ebola. Within 48 hours, they set up asp field hoal in the town of guecedou, the epicenter of th outbreak. The first patients began to arrive. Most of those cases came from dierent villages or different areas in the city of gueckedou. Thats a very bad sign, becauset eans that you dont have just one cluster or one family or one village that is hit. It it means tha already spread out. Narrator past outbreaks had shown that the key to stopping ebola was to isolate the sick, monitor anyone who had contact with the infected, a safely bury the dead. This complex operation needed a level of manpower and coordination beyond the resources of doctors withouts. Bo i remember my headquarters asked me, what do you think . Is it five villages, or ten villages, or 15 villages, or more . And i remember iaid, if i have to choose between those three options, i do believe its 15 or more. And i said, like, i think we have a big problem. Narrator the wld health organization, who, is part of thenited nations and has a mandate to help governments codinate their response to outbreaks. We thought, okay, here is a disease that we have dealt with for a number of decades before, and you know, in our own mind, we had the idea that ebola was something which was severe, but typically occurred in a certain way and then could be handled. But at that time, we didnt rely know how complex it w going to become. Narrator the whoeft thesp rese in the hands of its officials in guinea, who had no experience of ebola. They set up what would become daily meetings with the government of guinea, Doctors Without Borders, and other aid organizations. Those daily meetings were a nightmare every day, day after day. Ng disorganized meeti no decision taken, no one knowing what they were talking about. The who people were really not at the level required for the job. Their coordinator never workedef on ebolae, and who was really downsizing the scale of the epidemic. Immediately, i thought, those people are useless. They dont even understand what they are supposed to do here. Who, although its a very ouportant Technical Agency powers are limited when we areer ing in countries. The countries take the lead, we advise hostly, and this is what we tried to do in guinea. Narrator the outbreakic kly spread 400 milesa to guis capital, conakry. Doctors without borders top ebola expe spoke out. Narrator the government of guinea accusedhe group of sowing panic. Narrator the ministry of health now ordered its teams in the field to include onlyrm laboratorycon cases of ebola in their death count. Narrator the ministry of n health tea stopped investigating deaths that werent confirmed ebola cases. Some of those deaths were in villages right on the International Border between guinea and sierra leone. Locals cross freely between the countries every day. Louise kamano lived in sierra leone, but in march, she came t stay with relative guinea. Her mother had ebola and had already crossed the border twice since she got infected. Narrator when louise fell siy too, she was frightened rumors that foreign doctors were killing peop. L narratoouise walked through thbush until she reached a river the border with sierra leone. There were no checkpoints, no immigration police. Narrator like her mother before her, louise had crossed the border carrying the sickness with her. No one knew it yet, but ebola was spreading in sierra leone. A few days after her journey, the who got a tipoff that louise was sick and had crossed into sierra leone. Louises name anlocation were rtlogged in an internal rend vernment. To the sierra leone we did bring louise to the attention of the sierra leoneme gove, and they came back and told us that louise had gone back to guineand that she was not in sierra leone. That was the last that we heard of this particular case. Narrator the sierra leone government says it was never informed about louise. Bo whats certain is thla was soon spreading through her home village. One of those to fall sick was a renowned traditional healer known as mendinor. Narrator on april 8, mendinor died, and her body was prepared for bial. La highly infectious, butwestis africa, its customary for asllagers to spend hours wng and preparing the body for the funeral. Narrator the traditional burial practices played a major role in the spread of the virus. Mourners often touch the body at the funeral itself. R narrato the healers neral was a catastrophe. It set off a Chain Reaction of infections that would lead to thousands of deaths. The outbreak was already raging in guinea, and now it began to spread unchecked through the villages of sierra leone, wiping out entire families. The healers niece even took the virus 250 miles to monrovia, the capital of liberia. Y nobody knew it, but thetb ouak was completely out of control. For more than a month, the government of sierra leone miss the deaths in its borde villages. Doctors without borders says it tried to get the government to pay attention. But sierra leone had turned for advice to an American Company called metabiota, who had a longstanding presence in the country researchintropical diseases. Metabiota had no experience in controlling Ebola Outbreaks. I said, this outbreak wi not last more than a few weeks. And that was after we identified the first week. The first two eks, we said, okay, thats a normal outbreak. We are confident it will be over in two months. We were getting advice from metabiota, and complacency set in. What can i say . Yes, it was ebola, but the magnitude had not hit us. So we took steps at that time that were advised by metabiota, but we never knew that it was going to be so big. Narrator the government decided to treat ebola victims at the State Hospital in the town of kenema, which already had a ward for lassa fever, a disease similar to ebola but less infectious. Th but wiin days, the hospitalie was overrun with pnts. Then the nurses started to die. crying if you go to the morgue, you see dead bodies, 15, 16, 17, 18 dead bodies all in body bags. Then i start to wonder, what is happening . Maybe this is the end. Of the wor maybe everybodys going toie. Narrator far from containing the outbreak, the hospital was helping to spread it. Will pooley, a british nurse, volunteered to work on the ebola ward. When a patient arrived, theyd walk in past these corpses that would be piling up across the path and sometimes next to the path. They were smelling quite badal until the bueam came, and it might take days. I was constantly gobsmacked that this snt a bigger deal. Like, people werent. You know, this wasnt being shouted out. G narrator ternment called in Doctors Without Borders. The plan was to build a dedicated ebola clinicei in theboring district. The group says that the t government andir advisors, metabiota, were still underestimating the scalof the problem. Do you think metabiota was the right organization to bere doing ouak response . No, were not specialists in outbreak response. We know how to do it because we have some kind of expertise in the domain, but we are too small, i mean, we are a very small company. Narrator the government andi metaa had no system in place to monitor people who had been inontact with ebola victim this lack of Contact Tracing meant that hundreds of cases went undetected. Nd a month is a disaster a disaster, yes. We wasted time. It was wrg, yeah. Narrator the outbreak had now spread to three countries guinea, sierra leone, and liberia, some of the poorest nations in the world. Four neighboring countries the who was considering moment. Declaring an International Health emergency, which would have acted as a global disess signal. But officials were concerned about causing panic. At that time, i think all of us thought, wait a minute. Lets be cautious, lets see how it evolves. We are deploying people in the field, we think we are making headways. With hindsight, if i went back to june 2014, i would probably be saying something entily different. Id probably be standing up and calling my director general and saying, please do it. Narrator the who opened a new Coordination Center in guinea to try to improveos the response acrwest africa. There was absolutely no change at field level. St ill the very same few organizations on the ground doing e work. No additional people coming to support. Eo more pple at coordination level, more useless ople, more meetings to be organized. On buhe ground, on the field, impact zero. Narrator kenema hospital in sierra leone was now overwhelmed. The who had sent two doctors to help with the caseload. But the patients kept coming, and the nurses kept getting infected. I think youd have to be crazy to think that anythingt but shutting thaace down would be the thing to do. And everyone knew thats what needed to happen, and that should have happened months before that, and had that have cohort of nurses, lab chs, and cleaners that wouldnt have died. So many lives would have been saved. crowd shouting nartor there were now so many deaths at the hospital that wild rumors started to spreadwn through the to this azy woman came out and stood right at the center of the town in the marketplace and started shouting, there is no ebola this woman was shouting, i am a nurse i am telling you people that we. Are just doing cannibali we are the ones that are killing people. We are removing their parts. And everybody in thepl markace, they go haywire, running, oh, there is no ebola a nurse is confessing that there is no ebola. Co and see the nurse, come and see, a nurse is confessing. Now everybody started throwingus stones a. O ey said, we are going tthe hospital, we are going to burn the kenema Government Hospital down. I was walking up to the unitr and there was this seam of nurses and lab techs walng at a very hurried paceast me in the other direction. And i could hear this mob, an angry mob. Its really unique sound. And the who, they all evacuated, so they got into their cars an drove off, leaving just a handful of people probably inside the whole hpital really, when there was a risk of the hospital being overrun. Narrator the Police Used Tear Gas to disperse the crowd. The streets went quiet, for now. But sierra leone was on the brink chaos. H the outbad now killedre mo than 800 people in three cotries. As the death count rose, Doctors Without Borders had been urging the o to declare an international emergency. I said that ive been telling the world for the last few nths that its an unprecedented, outofcontrol ebola epidemic. I dont ve the authority, people dont listen to me, but you, you need step up and declare it, because you have the authority and you have the legitimacy. Wfelt that if you simply go around and say things are out of control or theyreer this way or whatn a categorical way, it really doesnt help. And at this time, we knew that we had something which was not ordinary, but we were not dealing yet with the fullblown, you know, global crisis. Narrator tn the outbreak moved to another level. An infected liberian took the virus to nigeria, africas most populous country. And two American Health workers forced ebola into the headlines around the world. Ere just getting word in from the cdc, its confirmed the first ebola case diagnosed. Two infected missionaries flown from liberia and in isolation at an atlanta hospital. Narrator the who declared an international emergency. I am declaring the current outbreak of ebola virus disease a Public Health emergency of international concern. The committee acknowledges the serious and unusual nature of the outbreak and the potential for further international spread. Ra nr the who now put a highlevel team in geneva in charge of the response. They came up with plan that would require thousands of western medics and experts to be put into action. We were looking at one of the most dangerous patgens that we knew, growing at an exponential rate across a broad eographic area, something had never seen before. We needed Clinical Management people to go in there and manage the ebola cases. We needed Public Health expertise on the ground to be able to do the Contact Tracing. And i realized, that capacity to manage something on this scale doesnt exist. N arrator the problem was, the who had no Standing Army of emergency medics and no authority or budget for thiski of operation. Theyow needed to persuade wealthy countries to send ople to fight the outeak. And that would take time. Back in we africa, the virus had found a new Hunting Ground t west plum, the most monrovia, the capitalrict of liberia. I was called by theinister of health to say that peop were dying. Total, total confusion, chaos, disbelief, fear. No means of response because we didnt have the knoedge, we didnt have the equipment, we didnt have the means whereby we could attend to people. We did notave full awareness of how quickly this disease could spread, how deadly this disease was. We were confounded because it just spread so rapidly in these communities. Narrator monrovia d one small ebola clinic, and it was full. For the infected, there was nowhere to go. The government decided to use a school in west pointhi as a mak Isolation Center for suspected ebola cases. Finda, whose husband had just died, was forced to come here with her six children, even though none of them appeared to be sick. Oc narrator a journalist filmed finda and her children in the Isolation Center. There was no separation between the sick and theealthy. Very quickly, findas son sasko fell sick. Narrator outside, crowds were protesting that the slum was becoming a dumping groundov for monrias ebola victims. And once again, rumors were spreading that ebola was a hoax, a copiracy to kill poor africans. Four days afr it opened, the people shouting was overrun. Wa at the time hs dead, they placed the body on the ground and removed the maress. And they sawhe blood on the floor, they saw fluids on the floor, and theyre marching the floor with their feet. Narrator the loors took mattresses and sheetsed contamin with the virus, d the ebola victims disappeared back into e slums. Narrator west point was now out of control. sirens, gunfire fellow citizens, it hases become nsary to impose additional sanctions. Te communities of west po in monrovia are quarantined on a full securi watch. This means there will be no movement in and out of those areas. We oered the military to quarantine the place, to stop anybody fr leaving. Our fear was people would run away and come from there and then go into other communities. Thats why we did that. Unfire narrator the quarantine backfired immediately. The army shoa teenage boy,m who later diedhis wounds. And the infected had now to go except the streets, so the virus was spreading more quickly. By now, one of findas children, sasko, was dead. The rest desperately needed help. Arrator as west point descended into chaos, Doctors Without Borders had been constructing elwa 3, the biggest ebola hospital ever built. But when it opened, it was immediately clear it would not be enough. Brett adamson was the field coordinator for the clinic. People were dying outside, families were dying in taxi cabs outside. They were arriving seeking care. The families had nowhere else to go, the center was full, and essentially, they werein wa. The center was waiting for someone to die to thenpa make. Narrator stefan liljegren was recruited on short notice to work at the clinic. Eb he had no a experience. I arrive and there are mattresses just next to each other full of ople and theyre dead, and i look at them and, okay, so thats how a dead person looks like. Theyre telling me that stefan, we cant just watch. We need to go in and move bodies. Are u ready for it . And i start to panic, and my pulse goes very high. There are de bodies in there,om and in grupositions. We go to the next one, and there are dead bodies in there as well. And we go up to a man in a chair. The guy with the spray goes upyi and he starts spra his face, and thats when it reay hits you, hes really dead. And we place out the body bag and zip him up, and we carry him away. And family are crying and screaming and yelling,ni and many are in that was my first day with ebola.