The Lassa Ward: One Man's Fight Against One of the World's Deadliest Diseases

תקציר הספר

Ross Donaldson is one of just a few who have ventured into dark territory of a country ravaged by war to study one of the world’s most deadly diseases. As an untried medical student studying the intersection of global health and communicable disease, Donaldson soon found himself in dangerous Sierra Leone, on the border of war-struck Liberia, where he struggled to control the spread of Lassa Fever. The words, “you know Lassa can kill you, don’t you?” haunted him each day. With the country in complete upheaval and working conditions suffering, he is forced to make life-and-death decisions alone as a never-ending onslaught of contagious patients flood the hospital. Soon however, he is not only fighting for others but himself when he becomes afflicted with a life threatening disease. The Lassa Ward is more than just an adventure story about the making of a physician; it is a portrait of the Sierra Leone people and the human struggle of those risking their daily comforts and lives to aid them.

Dr. Ross I. Donaldson, M.D., M.P.H., is a UCLA medical professor and works in one of L.A.’s main trauma centers. He is author of several medical textbooks, has been a humanitarian in some of the world’s most dangerous places, and is host of Lifetime’s Street Doctors. He lives in Venice Beach, California.

"No matter how low a cotton tree falls, it is still taller than grass."

Those are the words that a humanitarian physician, Dr. Aniru Conteh, uses as he leaves a young medical student in charge of a ward filled with critically ill patients, in a hospital flooded with refugees from a runaway civil war. Ross Donaldson was that idealistic student who gave up his comfortable life in the States to venture into Sierra Leone, a country ravaged by fighting and plagued by conflict that was streaming across the border from neighboring Liberia.

In a hospital ward with meager supplies, Ross has to find some way to care for patients afflicted with Lassa fever, a highly contagious hemorrhagic illness similar to Ebola. Forced to confront his own fear of the disease, he stands alone to make life-and-death decisions in the face of a never-ending onslaught of the sick who are inundating the hospital. Ultimately, he finds himself fighting not only for the lives of others but also for his own life.

The Lassa Ward is the memoir of a young man studying to become a physician while trying to make his way through a land where a battle against one of the world's deadliest diseases matches a struggle for human rights and human decency. It is also the story of a young doctor-in-the-making who rises to the occasion and does his best to save the patients in his care, but not without finally having to confront his own human frailty.

"When I got there I started doing hands-on medical care. One of conclusions I came to is how much bigger impact you can make through training local health care workers, so it's sustainable when you leave and multiplies your impact when you are there . . . Being an advocate for health is a very important part of what I do and what I think physicians should do. Doctors get a lot of the credit but the truth is medicine is really a team effort. It's really the whole system that deserves the credit. When there's a breakdown, it's really the system that needs strengthening so you can bring up the level of care . . . I have noticed over the last couple years there has been a huge upturn in people interested in global health, and I think that's fantastic. It really is going to take a lot of bright young minds to deal with these problems. The money might come or go, but if you have a good feeling about helping other people that's not something you're going to lose in a recession. For students it's important to get some kind of skills they can help out with and also to get some experience in the field."—Ross Donaldson, The Seattle Times

"For living color, turn to The Lassa Ward, which effortlessly transmits both the facts and the fascination of a bad infectious outbreak. Dr. Ross Donaldson spent two months in Sierra Leone as a medical student in 2003. Malaria, tuberculosis, yellow fever and AIDS were rampant, but Dr. Donaldson, for reasons clear perhaps only to the invulnerable post-adolescent he was at the time, decided to spend his time with Lassa fever patients. This rat-borne illness is one of Africa’s dire viral hemorrhagic fevers; like Ebola, it can reduce a human body to a bruised, bloated corpse in days. It is terrifying—the secretions of infected patients easily spread the disease—but it is also treatable, and in the best cases patients get well and go home. Dr. Donaldson had trailed the elderly Lassa specialist Dr. Conteh for only a few weeks when, to his horror, he was left alone in charge of the Lassa isolation ward. 'No matter how low a cotton tree falls, it is still taller than grass,' the old doctor said as he left to teach in another town. In other words, the inexperienced Dr. Donaldson, with three years of medical school, had more formal education than anyone else around. With patients who were sicker than sick, and little in the way of tests or treatments, Dr. Donaldson clung to the usual life preservers: the advice of a couple of experienced nurses and his own common sense. At the end of two weeks, he writes, 'I hardly recognized the person I had become.' He was a Lassa expert, veteran of the old education-by-immersion process that terrifies medical students no matter where they are. His take on epidemic infection is dead-on, down to the bizarre stubbornness that often permeates stricken communities and prevents the very changes that might save lives. (For Lassa, a key preventive measure was to stop eating rats, but rat meat tasted far too good for that advice to be taken seriously.)"—Abigail Zuger, M.D., The New York Times

"Donaldson started out as an earnest, well-meaning American medical student, off on a great African adventure. He came of age in the middle of a raging epidemic, civil war, and hideous poverty, discovering a humanity few Americans ever experience. Donaldson has bared his soul, offering a lesson that should be required reading for every doctor-in-training."—Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health

"A touching and compelling account. The Lassa Ward brings to life the challenges and rewards that dedicated development workers face daily around the world."—Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2001 Nobel laureate in economics

"Intrepid medical-school student confronts a deadly virus decimating West Africa. During his second year of medical school, Donaldson became intrigued by the deadly Lassa fever, a rat-borne hemorrhagic virus closely related to the Ebola and Marburg varieties that, left untreated, virtually liquefies the body's internal organs. Convinced he could help ease the suffering, he spent the summer of 2003 in civil-war-torn Sierra Leone, where Lassa was reaching epidemic proportions. The trip, Donaldson admits, while initially an exhilarating 'm

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The Lassa Ward: One Man's Fight Against One of the World's Deadliest Diseases

Ross Donaldson

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