Word: kikwit
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...darkened doorway of an abandoned building, the medical team finds an empty coffin, waiting like carrion. One by one, neighbors explain, the family that lived there died. First the daughter, 18, went to the Kikwit 2 maternity hospital in late March for a caesarean section. When she got home her incision began to bleed. Then her organs began to melt. The red-black sludge wiggled out of her eyes, her nose, her mouth. Soon her parents got sick. Her father, some villagers believe, died of horror: he told his wife that if she died, he would...
...story, and his heart sinks. He knows as much about the lethal Ebola virus as anyone alive; he was part of the team that investigated the first recorded outbreak, also in Zaire, two decades ago. Now he is leading the international brigade that has come to the city of Kikwit to battle the new emergency. "The virus is still loose, and it's spreading," he says. "If the mattress is warm and damp, and people go in and sleep on it, we're going to be in trouble." The villagers are terrified, and resigned. "It's useless...
...looked as though the outbreak might soon be brought under control. The plague police-medical teams dispatched by who in Geneva, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (cdc) in Atlanta and other public health groups-had set up an effective isolation ward at the main hospital in Kikwit, where the first case had been identified. Belgium's Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) rushed in loads of gloves, gowns, masks and other essential equipment to restore hygiene to filthy clinics. But when the strike forces, aided by local medical students, fanned out through the countryside around Kikwit...
...week's end, there were 49 confirmed deaths from Ebola and 50 more suspected-the number was highly uncertain because Kikwit is also dealing with an outbreak of shigellosis, a form of dysentery whose symptoms can easily be confused with Ebola's. While the death toll is certain to rise, since the virus' incubation period lasts up to 21 days, infectious-disease experts doubt that the Ebola will travel much farther than it has already, even within Zaire. Says Dr. Ralph Henderson, an assistant director-general of the World Health Organization: "We are not talking about thousands or tens...
That means that most people, especially those outside Zaire, have little to fear from Ebola. Says Dr. Peter Piot, who investigated the first Ebola outbreak in 1976 and heads the United Nations aids program: "It's theoretically feasible that an infected person from Kikwit could go to Kinshasa, get on a plane to New York, fall ill, and present a transmission risk there. But even if this were to happen, it would likely stop there...