Major support is provided by the john d. And catherine t. Macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. More information a macfound. Org. The Ford Foundation working withisionaries on the frontlines of social change worldwide. At fordfoundation. Org. Additional support is provided by the abrams foundation, committed to excellence in journalism. The park foundation, dedicated to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. The john and Helen Glessner family trust. St supporting trthy journalism that informs and inspires. And 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 down to market. I could hear and see the crowd of people screaming and shouting. people shouting i can see that hes afraid. I see he has picked up a rock and hes waving it around. Hes followed by a lot of people, telling us, you have to take him down. He is infecting our community. We dont know where hes going. shouting continues the pressure from the crowd is mounting. Theyre yelling at us. So the guys in the suits wrele him to the ground and li him into the back of the pickup. It was like watching 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 dream . But no, it wasnt. It was for real. Narrator in december 2013, the childr of meliandou village discovered hundreds of bats nesting in a hollow tree. They had no idea that bats are suspected of carrying a deadly virus. Nody knows for sure but the villagers now think this is where it all began thunder rumbling had killed oneyearole oumanou. Ed oneyearole his sister died nine days later. Then his mother fell ill. She was seven months pregnant. Narrator a traditional healer gathered everyone together, including more family members who had become sick. A villager filmed the ceremony narrator the next , emiles grandmother, left the village to seek treatment. She infected a nurse at a local hospital. The sickness began to spread across the Forest Region of guinea, but for three months was mistaken for cholera and malaria. Ru by march, the s had traveledan hundreds of miles killed more than 50 people. E government sent a team of scientts to investigate and take blood samples. Narrator the doctor trackeda down a teenager med khalil, who was sick with the mystery disease. His colleague started filming on an ipad. moaning narrator khalils blood would later be tested. The results ebola. Narrator the government guinea had no idea how to respond. All previous Ebola Outbreaks had s occurred over 1,000 mileay. But the relief group doctorsha without borderdecades of experience with ebola. Within 48 hours, they set up a Field Hospital in the town of gueckedou, the epicenter of the outbreak. Th e first patients began to arrive most of thoseases came from different villagesor ifferent areas in the city of gueckedou. Er thats abad sign, because it means that you dont have just one cluster or one familyil or onege that is hit. It means that its 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, and safely bury the dead. This complex operation needed a level of manpower and coordination beyond the reurces of Doctors Without Borders. I remember my headquarters asked me, what do you think . Is it five villages, or ten villages, or 15 villages, more . And i remember i said, if i have to choose between those three options, i do believe its 15 or more. An i said, like, i think we have a big problem. Narrator the world health organization, who, is part of the United Nations and has a mandate to help governments coordinate their responseto utbreaks. Disease that we have diths a for a number of decades before, inand you know, in our own we had the idea that ebolawa was something whicsevere, but typically occurred in a certain way anthen could be handled. But at that time, we didnt really know how complex it was going to become. Narrator the who left the response in the hands of i officials in guinea, who had no experience of ebola. Th set up what would become ily meetings with the government of guinea, Doctors Without Borders, and otr aid organizations. Those daily meetingsve were a nightmare day, day after day. Disorganized meetings, no at they were talking about. Ing the level required for thenot job. Their coordinator never woed on ebola before, and who wasns really ding the scale of the epidemic. Immediately, i thought, those people are useless. They dont even understand whate theyupposed to do here. Who, although its a very important technical agency, our powers are limed when we are operating in countries. The countries take the lead, we advise honestly, and this is what we tried to do in guinea. Narrator the outbreak quickly spread 400iles to guineas capital, conakry Doctors Without Borders top ebola expert spoke out. Nartor the government of guinea accused the group of sowing pan. Narrar the ministry of health now ordered its teams in the field to include only laboratoryconfirmed cases of ebola in their death count. Tr narrator the minof health teams now stopped investigating deaths that werent confirmed ebola cases. Some of those deaths were invi ages right on the International Border between guinea and sierra leone. C locass freely between the countries every day. Louise kamano lived in sierra leone, but in march, she came to stay with relatives in guinea. Her mother had ebola and hadal ady crossed the border twice since she got infected. Nrator when louise fell sick too, she was frightened by rumors that foreign doctors were killing people. Narrator louise walked through the bush until she reached a river the border with sierra one. There were no eckpoints, no immigration police. Narrator like her mother the border carrying the sickness with her. It no one kneet, but ebola was spreading in sierra leone. Eya few days after her jou the who got a tipoff that louise was sick and had crossed into sierra leon louises name and location were logged in an internal report and passed on to the siea leone government. Attention of the sierreto the government, and they came back and told us that louise had gone back to guinea and 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 formed about louise. Whats certain is that ebola was soon spreading through her home village. Se one of to fall sick was a renowned traditional healer known as mendinor. Narrator on april 8, mendinor died, and her body was prepared for burial. The corpse of an ebola victim is highly infectious, but in west africa, its customary for villagers to spend hours washing and preparing the body for the funeral. Narrator these traditional joburial practices played r role in the read of the virus. O mourneften touch the body at the feral itself. Narrator the healers funeral was a catastrophe. It set off a Chain Reaction ofct infens that would lead to thousands of deaths. As the outbreaklready raging in guinea, and now it began to spread unchecked through the villages of sierra leone, ping out entire families. The healers niece even took the virus 250 miles to monrovia, the capital of liberia. Nobody yet knew it, but the outbreak was completely out of control. For re than a month, the government of sierra leone missed the deaths in its border 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 researching tropical diseases. Ta mebiota had no experience in controlling Ebola Outbreaks. I said, this outbreak will not last more than a few weeks. And that was after we identified the first wee the first two weeks, we said, okay, thats a normal outbreak. We are confident it will be ove in two month we were getting advice frometabiota, and complacenc set in. Wh can i say . Yes, it was ebola, but theno magnitude hahit us. So we took sps 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 ste hospital in the town of kenema, which already had a ward for lassa fever, a disease similar to ebola but less infectious. But within days, the hospil was overrun with patients. Then the nurses started to die. crying if you go to the morgue, you see dead bodies, 15, 1617, 18 dead bodies all in body bags. Then i start to wonder, what is happening . I maybe ththe end of the world. Maybe everybodys going to die. Narrator far from containin the outbreake 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 theath and sometimes next to the path. They were smelling quite bad until the burial team came, and it might take days. G i was constantlyobsmacked that this wasnt a bigger deal. Like, people werent. You know, this wasnt being shouted out. Narrator the government called in Doctors Without Borders. The plan was to build a dedicated eba clinic in the neighboring district. The group says that the government and their advisors, metabiota, were still underestimating the scale ofob the prlem. Do you think metabiota was the right organization to be doing outbreak response . Ts no, were not specialis in outbreak respon. 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 and metabiota had no system inlace to monitor people who had been in contact with ebola victims. This lack of Contact Tracing meant that hundreds of cases went undetected. And a month is a disaster. A disaster, yes. We wasted time. It was wrong, yeah. Narrator the outbreak had now spread to three countries ra guinea, sieone, and nations in the world. Poorest four neighboring countries risked infectiont any moment. The who was considering declaring an intertional health emergency, which would have acted as a global distress signal. On but officials were crned about causing panic. I at that time,hink 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 entirely different. Id probably be standing up and calling my director generalp and sayingase do it. Narrator the who openedon a new coordinatienter in guinea to tryo improve the response across west africa. There was absolutelyld no change at fieevel. Still the very same few organizations on the ground doing the work. No additional people coming to sport. More people at coordination level, more useless people, more meetings to be organized. But on the ground, on thfield, impact zero. Narrator kenema hospital in sierra leone was now overwhelmed. The who had sent two doctors to help with the caseload. Mibut the patients kept co, and the nurses kept getting infected t ink youd have to be crazy to tnk that anything but shutting that place 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 happened, theres a whole cohort of nurses, lab techs, and cleaners that wouldnt have many lives would have been saved. crowd shouting narrator there were now sony maeaths at the hospital that wild rors started to spread through the town. This crazy woman came out and stood right at the centerin of the town the marketplace and started shouting, there is no ebola this woman was shouting, i am a nurse i am telling you peoe that we are just doing cannibalism. We are the ones that are killing people. We are removing their parts. Th and everybodye marketplace, they go haywire running, oh, theris no ebola a nurse is confessing that there is no ebola. Come and see the nurse, comed e, a nurse is confessing. Now everybody started throwing stones at us. They said, we are going to the hospital, we are going to burn the kenema Government Hospital down. I was walking up to the unit, and there was this stream of nurses and lab techs walking at a very hurried pace past me t he other direction. And i coulhear this mob, an angry mob. And the who, they all ted,. So they got into their cars and drovf, leaving just a handful of people probably inside the whole hospitalen really, wh there was a risk of unthe hospital being overr. N arrator the police usedhe tear gas to disper crowd. Re the ets went quiet, for now. But sierra leone was on the brink of chaos. The outbreak had now killed more than 800 people in three countries. As the death count rose, Doctors Without Borders had been urging the who to declare an international emergency. I said that ive been telling the world for the last few months that its anun ecedented, outofcontrol ebola epidemic. I dont have the authority, people dont listen to me, but you, you need to step up and declare it, because you have the authority and you have the legitimacy. We felt that if you simply go around and say things are out of control or theyre this way or whatever in a categorical way, it really doesnt help. And at this timewe knew that we had something which was not ordinary, but we were not dealing yewith the fullblown, you know, global crisis. Narrator then 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 headlinesr nd the world. Were just getting word i 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 currentvi outbreak of ebola rus diseaseer a Public Health ncy of international concern. The committee acknowledges the serious and unusual nature ofth outbreak and the potential for further international spad. Narrator the who now put a highlevel team in geneva in charge of the response. They came up with a plan that would require thousands of western medics and experts to be put into action. We were looking at one of the most dangerous pathogens, that we knowing at an exponential rate across a broad geographic area, something we 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. T and i realized, apacity to manage something on this scale doesnt exist. Narrator the problem was, the who had no Standing Army of emergency medics d no authority or budt for this kind of operation. They now needed to persuade wealthy countries to send people to fight the outbreak. And that would take time. Back in west africa, the virus had found a new Hunting Ground west point slum, the most densely populated district of monrovia, the cital of liberia. I was called by the minister of health to say that people were dying. Total, total confusion, chaos, disbelief, fear. No means of response because we didnt have the knowledge,we didnt have the equipment, we didnt have the means whereby we could attend to people. We did not have full awareness of how quickly this disease could spread, how deadly this disease wa we were confounded becausesp it just read so rapidly in these communities. Narrator monrovia had 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 point as a makeshift isolation cente for suspected ebola cases. Ad finda, whose husbandust with her six children, evenre though none of them appeared to be sick narrator a local journalist filmed finda and her children t isolation center. There was no separation between the sick and the healthy. Very quickly, findas son sasko fell sick. Narrator outside, crowdsat were protesting the slum ng dumping ground for monrovias ebola victims and once again, rumors were spreading that ebola was a hoax, a conspiracy to kill poor africans. Four days after it opened, the isolation cent was overrun. people shouting at the time he was dead, they placed the body on the ground and removed the mattress. And they saw the blood on the floor, they saw fluidsr on the floor, and th marching the floor with their feet. Narrator the looters took mattresses and sheets contaminated with the virus, and the ebola victims disappeared back into the slums. Narrator west int was now out of conol. sirens, gunfire fellow citizens, it has become necessary to impose additional sanctions. The communities of west point in monrovia are quarantined on a full security watch. This means there will be no movement in and ouof those areas. We ordered the military touarantine the place, to stop anybody from leaving. Our fear was people would runnd awayome from there and then go into other communities. Thats why we did that. gunfire narrator the quarantineme backfired diately. The army shot a teenage boy, who later died from his wounds. Go except the streets,whereto so the virus was spreading. More quick by now, one of findas children, sasko, was dead. The rest desperately needed help. Narrator as westoint descended into chaos, Doctors Without Borders had been constructi elwa 3, the biggest ebola hospital ever built. But when it opened, it wasld immediately clear not be enough. Brett adamson was the fieldfo coordinatothe clinic. Yi people were outside, families were dying in taxi cabs outside. They were arring seeking care. The families had nowhere else to go, the center was full, and essentially, they were waiting. The center was waiting for someone to die to then make space. Narrator stefan liljegrencr was uited on short notice to work athe clinic. He had no ebola experience. E i arrive and there ar mattresses just next to each other full of people and theyre okay, so thats how a deadd, person looks like. Theyre telling me that sfan, we cant just watch. We need to go in and move bodies are you ready for it . And i start to panic, and my pulse goes very high. There are dead bodies in th