Kenema, Sierra Leone | AFP | Tuesday 11/18/2014 - 04:21 GMT
by Anne CHAON
Set apart from an Ebola unit under canvas in Sierra Leone, a nursery isolates children from their infected mothers, giving the youngsters their best chance of staying alive.
The survival rate among patients infected by the virulent tropical virus is a brutal 30 percent, but among toddlers it becomes vanishingly small.
So medics in the eastern diamond mining town of Kenema house the children of patients separately in a Red Cross "intermediate observation unit" -- known less formally as "the kindergarten".
The unit is playing host to six infants when AFP visits, including a baby of just two months who sleeps serenely while his new neighbours play under the watchful eye of a team of nurses.
German paediatrician Joachim Gardemann, director of the Kenema treatment centre, calls these chaperones -- each immune by virtue of having survived the virus -- his "special forces".
They observe the children around the clock, reporting the slightest change in behaviour.
"Children, especially small ones, do not exhibit the same early symptoms as adults," says Gardemann -- pointing to the fever, vomiting and diarrhoea seen in older patients.
"They stop playing, eating and laughing, sit in a corner and then deteriorate within hours. So we need to watch them constantly and get to know them."
Staff noticed that Fatima, eight, had been frequently scratching herself a day earlier and seemed agitated but she is fine today and crowds around the doctor with the other children when he pays a visit.
Ebola, unlike influenza, is not airborne and is not easily spread among populations. But bodily fluids containing the virus are highly infectious and it spreads easily among mothers and their children.
The youngest offspring -- regularly carried, fed and bathed -- are the most at risk when a mother contracts Ebola.
"When a baby is breastfed, as is usually the case, if the mother falls ill, it is almost certain to be infected in turn," said Gardemann.
"But as long as infection is not confirmed, the only alternative is to separate the child from her."
- 'Easier to distract' -
Boss, aged four, is the longest-standing resident of the kindergarten, but is about to complete his quarantine period of 21 days, the maximum length of time the virus takes to incubate.
The only real risk he runs from infection is contact with one of the newcomers who arrive daily from the west, where the epidemic is spreading fast, outpacing the capacity of hospitals, particularly in the capital Freetown.
Kenema, situated on the edge of an area of dense rainforest straddling Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea where the virus first emerged, has seen no new cases for three weeks.
Gardemann tries as best as he can to separate his little patients completing their quarantine from those just arriving.
"The best solution would be to have one child per room but it isn't manageable nor desirable psychologically," he says.
The 59-year-old -- nicknamed "Indy" after Harrison Ford's "Indiana Jones" by his admiring medical students at Germany's University of Munster -- says children respond better to Ebola than adults, who get easily depressed.
"They sing, they dance, they are more easily distracted," he tells AFP.
Even the intimidating biohazard suits and enormous masks that hide the faces of carers and scare their adult patients have little effect on the children, says Gardemann.
"They recognise our voice, our name," he tells AFP.
The medic, who once learned to juggle in order to communicate with a mute patient in a psychiatric unit, is occasionally given to demonstrating his talent to his tiny residents.
The hope is that their high spirits will keep them mentally and physically strong, and that, above all, they will not join the "red zone" of sick children, on the other side of the camp.
ach/mrb/sst/ft/gj
© 1994-2014 Agence France-Presse