The crisis of Ebola, which has left hundreds dead in the tribal chiefdoms of Sierra Leone, began allegedly with one healer's claims of having special powers, Agence France-Presse reported.
If not for the herbalist in the remote eastern border village of Sokoma, the outbreak would have never spread from Guinea, health officials revealed to AFP. "She was claiming to have powers to heal Ebola. Cases from Guinea were crossing into Sierra Leone for treatment," Mohamed Vandi, the top medical official in the hard-hit district of Kenema, told AFP.
"She got infected and died. During her funeral, women around the other towns got infected." As the mourners spread out across the rolling hills of the Kissi tribal chiefdoms at the herbalist's funeral, a chain reaction of infections, deaths, funerals and more infections began.
Since then, a worrying outbreak turned into a major epidemic when the virus finally hit Kenema city on June 17.
Since it emerged in southern Guinea at the start of the year, more than 1,220 have been killed by the disease, spreading first to Liberia and cutting a gruesome and gory swathe through eastern Sierra Leone since May.
"The tropical pathogen can turn people into de facto corpses with little higher brain function and negligible motor control days before they die," according to AFP. "The virus attacks almost every section of tissue, reducing organs and flesh in the most aggressive infections to a pudding-like mush which leaches or erupts from the body."
"The virus is highly infectious through exposure to bodily fluids, and its early rapid spread in west Africa was attributed in part to relatives touching victims during traditional funeral rites."
Meanwhile, an ethnically-diverse, Krio-speaking city of 190,000, Kenema already has the highest incidence of Lassa fever -- another viral haemorrhagic disease -- in the world, AFP reported. But the brutality and cold efficiency of the Ebola virus -- described in medical literature as a "molecular shark" -- caught the city's shabby, chaotic hospital off-guard.
