Ebola survivor Randall Varney lost nine family members, including his parents and seven siblings, to the virus in just three months in 2014, before himself contracting the disease. After learning that he could still sexually transmit the virus up to 90 days after recovery, he resolved to do everything possible to ensure the safety of his wife.
On 16 March 2020, Liberia registered its first case of COVID-19. Like other countries, it grappled with the pandemic, prompting the government to implement various strategies to respond and contain the outbreak.
With only 7766 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 125 deaths, Sierra Leone’s achievements in the face of the global pandemic have their roots in the harsh lessons delivered by the Ebola outbreak of 2014–2016, which took 4000 lives.
Washington Mushobozi, who was isolated in a Marburg Virus Disease treatment facility, says he does not know if he could have coped with missing his mother’s funeral had it not been for the warmth and kindness of the social workers who helped him through his grief.
When 13-year-old Eswatini primary school pupil Tenele Sibandze* (not her real name) overcame her fear of being vaccinated against human papillomavirus (HPV), she became one of tens of thousands of young girls protected against cervical cancer, the country’s leading cancer among women aged 15 to 49.
By the end of 2022 Liberia’s COVID-19 vaccination rate was among the top three in Africa, at 81%. The country had also, at the height of the pandemic, introduced two new vaccines, immunizing more than 1.8 million children against polio and nearly 400 000 against typhoid.
When a man in Temessadou M’Boket – a village in the densely forested southern Guinea region – died in early August 2021 after suffering fever, headache and haemorrhage, Fassara Diawara, the head of a local clinic, was quick to act.
It was only during a routine medical examination for a job opportunity abroad that Emmanuel Lutamaguzi, 28, founder of the Hepatitis Aid Organization in Uganda, discovered he was infected with Hepatitis B. His wife and baby boy both tested negative and received a vaccine to prevent them from contracting the disease.
Lying in a hospital bed, Idriss Yahya Annour, who recently fled the conflict in Sudan to neighbouring Chad, recalls how the vehicle they were escaping in came under fire in an attack that left him with a bullet wound and a fractured femur.
After the Batsirai and Emnati cyclones hit Madagascar’s south-eastern Vatovavy region in February 2022, Toky Rabemaharo suddenly found himself and his community cut off from basic health services. “Being able to attend a health centre was an unattainable luxury for us,” he recalls.
