Summary
Last November Sierra Leone was declared Ebola free. By then, the epidemic had killed over 11,000 people in West Africa. The speed at which it took off highlighted the poor state of healthcare in the affected countries. Now in Sierra Leone some of the facilities created to deal with Ebola are being repurposed, to take in wider health care needs.
The capital Freetown’s main hospital now has a new accident and emergency department, developed from the facilities created there to deal with Ebola. Around the country medical laboratories set up to detect and confirm Ebola cases are now being equipped with new diagnostic machines capable of detecting nearly 50 other viral diseases.
BBC Health correspondent Matthew Hill has been to take a look and asks how useful this high-tech approach will be in the fight against disease in Sierra Leone.
(Photo: A sign warning of the dangers of ebola outside a government hospital in Freetown on August 13, 2014, Credit: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
| 0:03.0 | The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, |
| 0:07.0 | go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. broadcasts. |
| 0:22.0 | I've just boarded a high-powered C Coach Express, the Ernest Corona, named after the President of Sierra Leone. |
| 0:24.4 | We've got across the deepest harbour in West Africa towards the peninsula, |
| 0:29.2 | where he lives in the capital free town. |
| 0:31.6 | I can see mountains ahead rising from the sea, a magical |
| 0:35.4 | landscape and in the distance the tropical white sandy beaches but underneath |
| 0:40.4 | this taste of Paradise lies a far more bitter taste. |
| 0:44.4 | The reality for the vast majority here of grinding poverty that comes from living on less |
| 0:49.3 | than $2 a day. |
| 0:52.0 | Over the next week I'll be with a group of microbiologists from Public Health England or |
| 0:56.6 | P.H.E as they're known who are here on a mission. |
| 1:00.5 | Their Ebola testing laboratories have been at the forefront of this tiny nation's fight against a disease that's claimed over 11,000 lives. |
| 1:09.0 | Phe want to save even more lives by handing their state-of-the-art labs to a new generation of scientists |
| 1:16.4 | from this former war-torn country. The plan is to identify deadly infectious diseases that don't catch the international headlines in the same way |
| 1:25.0 | that Ebola has since the outbreak began two years ago. |
| 1:29.2 | But in a country where most people can't afford health care and where more than one in ten babies don't |
| 1:34.9 | survive birth is offering the most sophisticated tests money can buy the real |
| 1:40.8 | answer to this sickly nation's health crisis. |
| 1:45.0 | The international community should come in to make sure that a sustainable health system |
| 1:51.0 | is built in this country so that we are not just left alone |
... |
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