* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Fanta, the two-year-old daughter of a Guinean father and a Malian mother died of Ebola on 24 October. 5 000 deaths into the epidemic, her passing away would most probably have gone unreported if it weren’t for the fact that she died in Mali. Fanta was the country’s first Ebola case.
More than a 1 000 kilometers separate the Guinean region of Kissidougou, where the toddler and her grandmother started their journey, from the Malian city of Kayes, itself just a short distance from the Senegalese and Mauritanian borders. 450 kilometres west of Kissidougou, a potentially infected Guinean caregiver, is reportedly being sought in Côte d’Ivoire which shares an 800 km long border with Guinea and Liberia and could soon become the seventh West African country to deal with Ebola. Both events highlight the vulnerability of countries that share borders with the most affected region.
Fanta was already ill with fever and a nosebleed during the long bus journey from Kissidougou to Kayes, after her father’s funeral. A day after reaching her destination, she was admitted to the regional hospital of Kayes. She got transferred to the intensive recovery unit for malnourished children, a structure put in place by the Red Cross with support from the European Commission’s humanitarian aid department (ECHO). But so far from the Guinean border Red Cross volunteers had not yet received specific trainings to deal with Ebola.
