MOSCOW, August 15 (RIA Novosti) - Over 40 percent of those infected with Ebola in West Africa have survived so far, but their return to normal life is a physical and mental battle, Bloomberg reported Friday.
“Many of our neighbors won’t come to our house now… My friends don’t visit, thinking that if they come near our house, they’ll catch the virus,” Bloomberg’s Silas Gbandia and Caroline Chen quoted survivor Fudia Sesay of Sierra Leone as saying.
“This activity of re-integration of surviving patients in their villages and communities can take a long time and sometimes needs a great deal of explanation and several visits to ensure that the person has been fully accepted into the community,” Magali Deppen, a spokeswoman for the Doctors Without Borders aid group was quoted by Bloomberg.
The stigma of Ebola not only prevents survivors from returning to their previous lives and social circles, but also causes the spread of the infection through patient falsification.
“People don’t want to be associated with the health crisis. When you ask them about their traveling history they give you false information,” another survivor, Sulaiman Kanneh Saidu, a health worker in Koindu, Sierra Leone said.
Saidu caught the disease during the examination of a sick woman who lied about her contact with the disease.
Apart from the apparent disgrace Ebola survivors also endure lasting side effects, including joint pain, dizziness and eye swelling, which can continue for years after survivors are cured, Bloomberg reported.
According to Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Ebola survivors also face psychological after-effects. Survivors of the 1995 outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were psychologically traumatized years later, said Garrett, who covered the outbreak as a reporter for New York Newsday, and returned three years later to visit survivors. Garrett explained that many felt betrayed by their family when they caught the virus, a feeling they may not be able to overcome after re-entering their homes.
The Ebola virus disease outbreak in West Africa, which has affected Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, has claimed 1,069 lives, while almost 2,000 have been infected. The disease’s historical fatality rate is close to 90 percent.
