Every
few days, usually in the late afternoon, two new friends meet for a
long talk. Sometimes it lasts three hours, and sometimes people come
from other huts to listen. They talk about other patients in the
hospital who died around them, painfully, in pools of blood. They
compare what it felt like to be so sick themselves.
Their talk, a bit dumbfounded, all turns around a strange miracle: that they were not struck dead after contracting Ebola, when at least 162 others have died since an epidemic erupted in Uganda in September.
The Ebola virus is one of the world's deadliest, at times killing 90 percent of its victims.
''We both say we never thought we would survive Ebola,'' one of the friends, Pido Jibinino, 39, said in a huge encampment of mud huts about 20 miles north of here called Pabbo. ''We say it is good enough that we are alive and can still enjoy the world.''
The epidemic appears to be running its course. Three people died this week, half as many as died in one day at the epidemic's height in October. Now much of the concern has shifted to those who have made it through.
Their talk, a bit dumbfounded, all turns around a strange miracle: that they were not struck dead after contracting Ebola, when at least 162 others have died since an epidemic erupted in Uganda in September.
The Ebola virus is one of the world's deadliest, at times killing 90 percent of its victims.
''We both say we never thought we would survive Ebola,'' one of the friends, Pido Jibinino, 39, said in a huge encampment of mud huts about 20 miles north of here called Pabbo. ''We say it is good enough that we are alive and can still enjoy the world.''
The epidemic appears to be running its course. Three people died this week, half as many as died in one day at the epidemic's height in October. Now much of the concern has shifted to those who have made it through.
Oddly,
for a disease so deadly, in which people die after high fever and
hemorrhaging blood from every orifice, those who survive typically make a
full recovery, which Mr. Jibinino demonstrated by jumping vigorously
into the air.
But other effects linger. Spouses left those who were infected. Neighbors burned belongings -- blankets, clothes, beds, a few entire huts -- in an already poor place. Many survivors, returning alive but weak, have found themselves shunned, occasionally with walls built around them.
Only now, after a concerted education campaign similar to the one officials began three months ago to warn of the dangers of Ebola, are survivors being accepted back into their communities.
''At first there were difficulties,'' said Johnson Okello, 23, a student and a volunteer with the Ugandan Red Cross who rides a black bicycle around Gulu to check on the survivors and tell others that they pose no danger. ''They were having fear that people would still be infected.''
Slowly, he said, survivors are being welcomed back to their own homes, as he and others convince neighbors that the disease is over once a person has been cured. But as a man who has as close contact as anyone with the people who had the disease only weeks ago, Mr. Okello says he understands the wariness.
''Even now, I'm afraid,'' he said as he walked through a path to visit several survivors on the outskirts of Gulu. ''If you joke with Ebola it will joke with you.''
Exactly how many people have survived is under dispute and has become a difficult political issue.
The World Health Organization this week reported that just over 60 percent of the people who contracted the virus in Uganda survived. Ugandan government officials have said it is closer to 70 percent, citing their own quick response in containing the disease as keeping deaths down.
But officials with the Centers for Disease Control, which set up the first-ever field laboratory in an Ebola outbreak, have unofficially put the number at just over 50 percent. That is better than other outbreaks of this strain of Ebola, but not much.
Health officials say that in fact, the Ebola strain now in Uganda has played a large part in keeping the numbers down. There are four known strains. The worst has killed about 90 percent of its victims, as it did in an outbreak in the Congolese city of Kikwit in 1995, when 244 people died.
The strain in Uganda, the weakest of the four, has killed between 50 and 55 percent of its victims, health officials say.
But other effects linger. Spouses left those who were infected. Neighbors burned belongings -- blankets, clothes, beds, a few entire huts -- in an already poor place. Many survivors, returning alive but weak, have found themselves shunned, occasionally with walls built around them.
Only now, after a concerted education campaign similar to the one officials began three months ago to warn of the dangers of Ebola, are survivors being accepted back into their communities.
''At first there were difficulties,'' said Johnson Okello, 23, a student and a volunteer with the Ugandan Red Cross who rides a black bicycle around Gulu to check on the survivors and tell others that they pose no danger. ''They were having fear that people would still be infected.''
Slowly, he said, survivors are being welcomed back to their own homes, as he and others convince neighbors that the disease is over once a person has been cured. But as a man who has as close contact as anyone with the people who had the disease only weeks ago, Mr. Okello says he understands the wariness.
''Even now, I'm afraid,'' he said as he walked through a path to visit several survivors on the outskirts of Gulu. ''If you joke with Ebola it will joke with you.''
Exactly how many people have survived is under dispute and has become a difficult political issue.
The World Health Organization this week reported that just over 60 percent of the people who contracted the virus in Uganda survived. Ugandan government officials have said it is closer to 70 percent, citing their own quick response in containing the disease as keeping deaths down.
But officials with the Centers for Disease Control, which set up the first-ever field laboratory in an Ebola outbreak, have unofficially put the number at just over 50 percent. That is better than other outbreaks of this strain of Ebola, but not much.
Health officials say that in fact, the Ebola strain now in Uganda has played a large part in keeping the numbers down. There are four known strains. The worst has killed about 90 percent of its victims, as it did in an outbreak in the Congolese city of Kikwit in 1995, when 244 people died.
The strain in Uganda, the weakest of the four, has killed between 50 and 55 percent of its victims, health officials say.
No
matter how the numbers end up, though, it is clear that the Ugandan
authorities, with lessons learned from the nation's widely praised
program to combat AIDS, put into place an aggressive strategy to contain
the disease.
There is, to start, no medical treatment to counteract the virus. Doctors can only keep the fever down, hydrate victims and keep the virus from spreading. And so posters went up quickly warning people of symptoms and how to avoid catching it. Volunteers scoured communities for victims, dead and alive.
The effort was so vigorous that it may have undermined itself somewhat. The deaths this week came after more than two weeks without any, and some officials say the quickness in burying corpses, in an area where funeral ceremonies go on for several days in part to make sure that people are actually dead, may have been a factor.
''There was some propaganda that we were burying people alive, that we are selling the bodies,'' said Lt. Col. Walter Ochora, chairman of the Gulu local government. ''So people started hiding patients. They really frustrated our efforts. By now, I think everybody would have been O.K.''
There is, to start, no medical treatment to counteract the virus. Doctors can only keep the fever down, hydrate victims and keep the virus from spreading. And so posters went up quickly warning people of symptoms and how to avoid catching it. Volunteers scoured communities for victims, dead and alive.
The effort was so vigorous that it may have undermined itself somewhat. The deaths this week came after more than two weeks without any, and some officials say the quickness in burying corpses, in an area where funeral ceremonies go on for several days in part to make sure that people are actually dead, may have been a factor.
''There was some propaganda that we were burying people alive, that we are selling the bodies,'' said Lt. Col. Walter Ochora, chairman of the Gulu local government. ''So people started hiding patients. They really frustrated our efforts. By now, I think everybody would have been O.K.''
One
who did not survive was the person perhaps most responsible for saving
the lives of victims. Dr. Matthew Lukwiya, 41, who first detected the
virus in Uganda and was head of St. Mary's Hospital in Lacor, died from
Ebola earlier this month, setting off grief and also tribute from Pope
John Paul II, foreign governments and the people he treated through
three horrific months.
''That doctor helped us in every way: in words, treatment, everything,'' said Joseph Odoki, 43, who was discharged from Lacor Hospital in November. ''We all felt so much sorrow, even up to now. It made people think that maybe if you went to the hospital you might not get cured.''
Mr. Odoki, who lives in Pabbo, survived Ebola, as did one wife, Rizina Aparo. But as is the case for most survivors, he may have recovered physically, but the life he held on to is not nearly the same: a 5-year-old son, Dennis, died of Ebola in October.
A second wife, with whom he had eight children, told his brothers after he was admitted to the hospital that she wanted nothing to do with him. She told him the same thing when he went to see her after he was cured.
Northern Uganda is not a pleasant place anyway, with nearly 400,000 people in squalid encampments to escape fighting between a rebel group, the Lord's Resistance Army, and the Ugandan military.
But Ebola has added to the miseries and created some wrenching sights. In a village outside Gulu called Kabedo, a group of seven children, all orphaned by Ebola, stood the other afternoon in a darkened hut peeling sweet potatoes and cutting greens for a supper cooked alone. The oldest, Pamela Acan, was just 12.
''I don't like to go out,'' she said. ''People hate me. They think I have Ebola.''
Not far away, a sergeant in the Ugandan Army, Obwona Galdino, 47, talked about how he had lost eight family members, including two of his children. His wife, Cecilia Amwech, 30, who was sitting at the side of their empty hut, survived the disease, but a pregnancy ended at six months.
''I never thought about dying,'' she said. ''I was so sick I couldn't think about anything.''
Sergeant Galdino said that at first his neighbors actually built brick walls over the paths that led out of his family compound. They would not get near him or his wife. ''They refused even my money,'' he said.
Slowly, though, neighbors have come by to visit, though he doubted that there would be much of the usual communal celebrations during this holiday season. He said he was not in the mood anyway.
''Since this happened,'' he said, ''I am not feeling anything.''
Another survivor, Lucy Lakot, 21, sat at her hut peeling potatoes. She was pregnant when she contracted Ebola, and the fetus has survived. But her husband, Charles Ojuk, 34, did not, and now she must raise the coming baby, and the two children they already have, alone. ''I am having a hard time,'' she said.
For money, she can only trade the few tomatoes she grows. For comfort, like Mr. Jibinino, she goes to visit another woman who made it though Ebola, named Onencan.
''We go and we talk about it,'' she said. ''We laugh and we feel normal.''
''That doctor helped us in every way: in words, treatment, everything,'' said Joseph Odoki, 43, who was discharged from Lacor Hospital in November. ''We all felt so much sorrow, even up to now. It made people think that maybe if you went to the hospital you might not get cured.''
Mr. Odoki, who lives in Pabbo, survived Ebola, as did one wife, Rizina Aparo. But as is the case for most survivors, he may have recovered physically, but the life he held on to is not nearly the same: a 5-year-old son, Dennis, died of Ebola in October.
A second wife, with whom he had eight children, told his brothers after he was admitted to the hospital that she wanted nothing to do with him. She told him the same thing when he went to see her after he was cured.
Northern Uganda is not a pleasant place anyway, with nearly 400,000 people in squalid encampments to escape fighting between a rebel group, the Lord's Resistance Army, and the Ugandan military.
But Ebola has added to the miseries and created some wrenching sights. In a village outside Gulu called Kabedo, a group of seven children, all orphaned by Ebola, stood the other afternoon in a darkened hut peeling sweet potatoes and cutting greens for a supper cooked alone. The oldest, Pamela Acan, was just 12.
''I don't like to go out,'' she said. ''People hate me. They think I have Ebola.''
Not far away, a sergeant in the Ugandan Army, Obwona Galdino, 47, talked about how he had lost eight family members, including two of his children. His wife, Cecilia Amwech, 30, who was sitting at the side of their empty hut, survived the disease, but a pregnancy ended at six months.
''I never thought about dying,'' she said. ''I was so sick I couldn't think about anything.''
Sergeant Galdino said that at first his neighbors actually built brick walls over the paths that led out of his family compound. They would not get near him or his wife. ''They refused even my money,'' he said.
Slowly, though, neighbors have come by to visit, though he doubted that there would be much of the usual communal celebrations during this holiday season. He said he was not in the mood anyway.
''Since this happened,'' he said, ''I am not feeling anything.''
Another survivor, Lucy Lakot, 21, sat at her hut peeling potatoes. She was pregnant when she contracted Ebola, and the fetus has survived. But her husband, Charles Ojuk, 34, did not, and now she must raise the coming baby, and the two children they already have, alone. ''I am having a hard time,'' she said.
For money, she can only trade the few tomatoes she grows. For comfort, like Mr. Jibinino, she goes to visit another woman who made it though Ebola, named Onencan.
''We go and we talk about it,'' she said. ''We laugh and we feel normal.''
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