Help save a life against ebola in Africa

At the jetty in Freetown, waiting for a boat to cross the wide estuary to the airport on the far side from the city, I encounter Professor Abdulsalami Nasidi, project director of the Nigerian Centres for Disease Control. He led the stunningly successful fight against Ebola in Nigeria. A catastrophe was predicted when Patrick Sawyer, a Liberian, flew into Lagos, a city of 21 million people, on 20 July straight from his sister’s funeral. He died from the disease, infecting nine doctors and nurses before anybody realised the lethal virus had arrived in their midst. Yet within three months, Nigeria was declared free of Ebola. There had been just 19 cases and seven deaths. Nasidi is off to Liberia for a high-level UN meeting. The white sands and lapping ocean by the jetty make you think you are on a paradise island for a moment, before you realise how much Sierra Leone has lost, thanks to Ebola as well as the earlier civil war. There are no umbrellas, no one on deckchairs and no tourist income at all. The only business in Sierra Leone is the Ebola industry, which offers the sorts of job that no one would have ever wished might be available – burying bodies and caring for the dying.