#CharityTuesday: Help Stop the Spread of Ebola by Supporting This Campaign for PPE

By Jennifer Kamara

I am the director of World Health Equity, an organization seeking to improve health equity for vulnerable populations. This July, I was in Sierra Leone managing our maternal health program in conjunction with international and national partners. Along with our team, I visited health providers at over 100 facilities. One day, I suddenly came down with a fever. Within 3 hours, I went from energetically training maternal health responders to shaking and shivering violently.  I was weak and my body ached to an excruciating degree. My symptoms were typical of malaria. However, my work put me at significantly higher risk of contracting Ebola. 

The two days it took for my blood tests to process seemed to last a lifetime. As my condition grew worse and I started to vomit, I realized that what scared me was not that I could be awaiting death. Surprisingly I could accept that possibility. What drove me to feel helpless and terrified, was the knowledge that if I had Ebola, that I would die without saying good-bye to my loved ones. Diseases cost lives every second of every day. For me, what is so ruthless about Ebola in particular, is the way it forces victims to anticipate death, be ostracized and feared, and remain void of human touch and personal connection. My test results came back negative for Ebola. I had never been happier to have Malaria and to feel the physical touch of family and friends through illness.

Today, close to 6,000 people have been infected with Ebola and over half of them have died. If these numbers appear small and not significant, surely Centers for Disease Control (CDC) worst-case scenario projections of as high as 1.4 million Ebola cases by January 2015 will put things into perspective. What these projections suggest, is that in two and a half short months, populations the size of Philadelphia, Barcelona, Johannesburg could face isolated death from Ebola. Today, weak health systems in West Africa continue to crumble. Restrictions to travel and trade are already causing prices for basic necessities to spike dramatically. Schools and universities have been closed for months. Tomorrow, this outbreak could become endemic and may literally annihilate countries! Unless we wake up and act, that is.