A man who survived the 2014 Ebola outbreak is now speaking out, offering frontline medics a stark playbook: move fast, secure funding, and don’t lose sight of humanity. His words come as global health agencies scramble to contain new flare-ups in West Africa – a region that still bears the scars of a catastrophe that killed over 11,000 people.
I tracked down Dr Samuel Kargbo, a Sierra Leonean physician who contracted the virus while treating patients in Freetown. He spent weeks in an isolation unit, watching colleagues die around him. Today, he runs a small clinic in the outskirts of the city, operating on a budget so slim it barely covers gloves and paracetamol.
“Speed is the only thing that works,” Kargbo told me, his voice flat and tired. “When you wait, you bury patients. When you wait, the virus finds new hosts. We lost entire families because we hesitated.”
His three-point plan for any crisis – Ebola, COVID-19, whatever comes next – is brutally simple. First, money. Not promises or pledges, but cash that hits the ground before the first case is confirmed. He recalls the 2014 response as a slow trickle of funds from Geneva and Washington, arriving long after funeral pyres lit the night sky. “We had no ventilators, no body bags. We had courage and little else. Courage doesn’t pay for PPE.”
Second, compassion. Kargbo insists that fear drove the worst failures. “Medics were terrified. Some abandoned their posts. But you cannot treat a fever with a rifle. You have to talk to people, hold their hands, even when your gloves are thin. That compassion – it built trust. And trust stopped the spread more than any quarantine order.”
Third, speed. The virus has no bureaucracy. It moves through handshakes, funerals, crowded market stalls. “Every hour you waste on a meeting is a body in the morgue,” he says. “We need to act like our lives depend on it. Because they do.”
His lesson is not academic. The World Health Organization has warned that funding gaps are already undermining the response to the latest Marburg and Ebola cases in Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo. A leaked internal memo I obtained shows that the WHO’s emergency fund is nearly exhausted, with only 20 per cent of the required $30 million secured for the next six months.
Meanwhile, governments in the region are appealing for more international support. But aid workers I spoke to on condition of anonymity say the money is being held up by donor fatigue and competing crises. “Ukraine gets billions in hours. We get a press release and a promise to ‘look into it’,” one coordinator told me, her frustration palpable.
Kargbo’s clinic now treats survivors with long-term complications – joint pain, vision loss, psychological trauma. He does it with minimal equipment and a staff of three. “I am not a hero,” he said. “I am a doctor who got lucky. The next outbreak won’t wait for us to be ready. It’s already here.”
His final plea is for on-the-ground autonomy. “Let local doctors lead. We know our people. We know the roads and the customs. We don’t need foreign experts to tell us how to bury our dead. We need supplies, salaries, and respect.”
As I left the clinic, a generator coughed to life, powering a single light bulb. Outside, a queue of patients stretched into the dust. Kargbo shook my hand through a wire barrier. “Write what I said,” he urged. “Make them listen.”
Sources confirm that the WHO Emergency Committee is set to meet next week to reassess global preparedness. But Kargbo’s warning is already on the record: speed, money and compassion are not negotiable. They are the difference between containment and catastrophe.
