The idea of a young lady taking care of 4 family members infected with Ebola in her home and without a hazmat suit already sounds like a terrifying tale.
The recent news about health workers contracting the deadly Ebola virus raises the concern about proper dressing. These nurses used to serve patients while wearing a hazmat suit, and yet days after, they found themselves in the same critical condition.
But Fatu Kekula, 22, of Liberia proves that she is doing something right with her methods: not only was she able to save 3 of her patients, but she herself never got infected.
Fatu was already in the last year of her nursing studies when Ebola happened in her country and eventually reached her family. Both of her parents, a cousin, and her sister all suffered from the very aggressive disease. She did the first thing any family member would do: bring the patients to the hospital. However, their already poor health care system, further weakened by the epidemic, can only do so much. Instead, she took matters into her own hand.
She created her own makeshift hospital right in her own home and purchased the supplies she thought she needed including disinfectants like chlorine.
Then she started wearing her own version of the hazmat suit: raincoats and boots, waders, gloves, socks, a mask, and, most of all, trash bags around her hair, inside her legs before she wore the boots, and any other part that may have been exposed.
She gave all her patients with the medications they needed to deal with the symptoms especially fever and diarrhea. Interestingly, she used medicine usually taken by AIDS patients, a similar method used by a doctor that treated more than 10 Ebola patients with HIV drugs.
Kekula developed her own protocol that greatly reduced the chances of infection spread including in her own body and allowed her family members to live for more days until they got the medical help they needed.
Although her cousin eventually passed away, her success still received praise and currently she's teaching the same method to her community.