FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — A second leading Sierra Leone doctor has succumbed to the Ebola epidemic sweeping across West Africa, dealing another blow to the country’s faltering efforts to stem the disease.
Dr. Modupeh Cole, 56, died Wednesday at the Ebola treatment center operated by Doctors Without Borders in the northeastern town of Kailahun, officials at the health ministry said.
He had apparently been infected while seeing a patient at the country’s leading hospital, Connaught Hospital, here in the capital, officials said. The patient later tested positive for Ebola.
The loss of Dr. Cole was described as significant by health officials in a country with a severe shortage of well-trained doctors, especially coming two weeks after the death of Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan, the virologist who was leading the fight against the disease in eastern Sierra Leone, where it has flourished.
Dr. Cole “was a highly qualified physician, and we have very few of them on hand,” said Dr. Amara Jambai, director of prevention and control at the health ministry. “You can imagine what this does to the younger cohort. It’s like having a general falling in battle. It just brings more misery. It’s not good. When you have a health system that’s constrained, it’s a bit too much.”
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Connaught, where Dr. Cole worked, is Sierra Leone’s leading referral hospital, so Ebola patients inevitably go there, initially at least. But it does not have a treatment center for them or an isolation ward.
It was one such patient who apparently passed the deadly disease to the doctor. “He was trying to see a patient, and the patient was falling,” Dr. Jambai said. “The patient was trying to help himself to the couch, and the patient fell.” The patient was positive for Ebola, he added.
Dr. Cole trained in the Soviet Union in the 1980s before returning to Sierra Leone in 1987, Dr. Jambai said.
The disease continues to spread, with the World Health Organization reporting 1,013 deaths across four countries — Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone — as of Saturday. Sierra Leone reported the most confirmed and probable cases, 730, and the third-highest death toll, 315. Health workers suspect that this figure may be far too low, given the number of confirmed Ebola cases in the country, 656.
On Tuesday, some of the rare experimental Ebola drug known as ZMapparrived in Liberia. The minister of foreign affairs, Augustine Ngafuan, transported three courses of the drug himself on a commercial flight from the United States. The Liberian government had announced that two courses would be administered to two doctors from John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Monrovia, the Liberian capital.
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