It is essential that a response is sustained until every single Ebola infection is prevented.
- Professor Ian Goodfellow
A Professor of Virology from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Pathology, arrived in Sierra Leone on December 1 to help set up a new diagnostics centre amid reports that the West African country is now the worst-hit by the Ebola crisis.
Ian Goodfellow, a norovirus specialist in the Department of Pathology, is part of the team of volunteers coordinated by Public Health England (PHE) to assist in the construction and running of the laboratory in Makeni, 120 miles to the north-east of the capital, Freetown. The laboratory is one of three being built in the country under the supervision of the UK Royal Engineers, with support from the Department for International Development.
One of the main difficulties faced by Sierra Leone and its neighbours in responding to the Ebola outbreak has been their limited capacity to test for the virus. Test results can currently take more than five days to come back. The Makeni lab, once it is fully functional, will be able to turn samples around in 24 hours or less. Together with the labs recently set up in Kerry Town and Port Loko, this will quadruple the country’s testing and diagnostic capacity, allowing health workers to isolate patients and contain the spread of the disease.
“Without a doubt the greatest challenge for our lab team so far has been logistics,” said Professor Goodfellow, writing from Makeni. “As we are the first team into the site we are responsible for setting up the laboratory. All the equipment and various reagents we need in the lab have had to be shipped from the UK, but getting them to Makeni has proven a real challenge.”
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Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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