BAMAKO, Mali — It started with a nurse whose positive test for Ebola came after her death.
Soon hospital officials were taking a second look at the case of a 70-year-old man who died after being brought to the capital late at night from Guinea suffering from kidney failure. A friend who visited him later died under suspicious circumstances, too.
It wasn’t renal disease, they then realized. The 70-year-old man had Ebola, and all three of the relatives who brought him to the clinic that night had all since been admitted to an Ebola treatment center back home in Guinea.
On Friday, Malian health authorities went to disinfect the mosque where the 70-year-old’s body was prepared for burial — nearly three weeks ago.
Already some are criticizing the Malian government for being too slow to react when health authorities had announced his death as a suspected Ebola case earlier in the week.
“It’s been 18 days since the Guinean man sick with Ebola died here. It’s just too late,” said Koumou Keita, his face full of worry.
For nearly a year, Mali had been spared the virus blamed for killing more than 5,000 people across West Africa, despite the fact the country shared a porous land border with Guinea, the country where the epidemic first erupted.
Now at least three deaths are confirmed from Ebola, and two others are suspected in Mali’s capital, Bamako. Residents who have seen the horrific death tolls from Ebola in neighboring Guinea fear the worst.
“I feel uneasy because I have the impression that our authorities are not giving us the whole truth,” said Ibrahim Traore, who works at a supermarket in the capital. “There are a lot of things not being said about how the Ebola virus came to Bamako.”
Health officials must try to track down not only those who visited the 70-year-old man at his hospital bed, but also the scores of people who prepared his body for burial and attended his funeral.
Teams of investigators are headed to the border community where authorities think the Patient Zero in the Bamako cluster — the 70-year-old man — fell ill.
On Sunday, U.S. health officials said anyone arriving in the U.S. from Mali will be subject to the same screening and monitoring procedures that were ordered last month for travelers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
