‘We’re all scared here’

“We don’t want any visitors,” said their leader, Faya Iroundouno, 17, president of Kolo Bengou’s youth league. As the others nodded in agreement, Iroundouno singled out the international aid group Doctors Without Borders. “Wherever those people have passed, the communities have been hit by illness.”

The World Health Organization is calling the West African epidemic, which has killed more than 600 people in four countries since March, the largest outbreak ever recorded of Ebola. But health workers say they are battling two enemies: the epidemic itself, and fear, which has produced growing hostility toward outside help.

Workers and officials, blamed by panicked populations for spreading the virus, have been threatened with knives, stones and machetes. Log barriers block medical teams from reaching villages where the virus is suspected. Sick and dead villagers, cut off from help, are infecting others.

“This is very unusual, that we are not trusted,” said Marc Poncin, the emergency coordinator in Guinea for Doctors Without Borders, the main group fighting the disease here.

Health officials say the disease is moving back and forth across the porous borders of Guinea and neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia, infiltrating the lively open-air markets, overwhelming weak health facilities and decimating villages.

It was in this rural area, 400 miles from Guinea’s capital Conakry, where the outbreak was first spotted, and where it has hit hardest. More than 80 per cent of those infected have died.

In Koundony, over one-eighth of the population, including the headman, is dead; many others have fled.

One of the most deadly diseases in the world, Ebola has no known cure. It causes raging fever, vomiting, diarrhoea and uncontrolled bleeding in about half the cases, and up to 90 per cent of the time, rapid death. Merely touching an infected person, or the body of a victim, is dangerous.

Now the fear of aid workers, principally from Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross, is helping spread the disease, officials say. Villagers flee at the sight of a Red Cross truck. When a Westerner passes, villagers cry out, “Ebola, Ebola!” and run away.

As recently as April, the epidemic seemed to be under control. But in the past two weeks, its centre appeared to have shifted across the border to Sierra Leone. The sick are being hidden and the dead buried, without any protection. The Sierra Leone Health Ministry has reported that its lead doctor fighting Ebola had contracted the disease, while the virus had spread to a fourth country, with a confirmed fatality in Nigeria.

Over the weekend, an aid organisation working in Liberia, Samaritan’s Purse, said that two Americans, a doctor who was treating Ebola patients and an aid worker, had tested positive. And the Liberian government said Sunday that one of its most high-profile doctors had died of Ebola, according to The Associated Press.

Back in Guinea, in the village of Wabengou, residents placed a tree on the road to block outsiders. They also attacked an official delegation from Conakry, brandishing machetes, according to Doctors Without Borders.

“We don’t want them in there at all,” said Wabengou’s chief, Marcel Dambadounou. He was surrounded by grim-looking men; none of them demurred. “We are absolutely afraid, and that’s why we are avoiding contact with everybody, the whole world,” he said.

Doctors Without Borders has set up an emergency treatment centre in the regional capital, Guéckédou, but a nurse there said the centre had diminishing appeal. “Here, if the people come in, they don’t leave alive,” said the nurse, Fadima Diawara.

Addressing villagers this month in Bawa, the regional prefect from Guéckédou, Mohammed Cinq Keita, warned: “There is no root, no leaf, no animal that can cure you. Don’t be fooled.”

Local officials have begun a campaign to open the closed villages — there have even been some recent arrests in Kolo Bengou — but in tiny Koundony, fear is palpable.

On a recent day, a Red Cross truck drove up to the cemetery to deliver the body of Marie Condé, 14, wrapped in plastic sheeting. As the body was carried off the truck, a wail pierced the country stillness. “There is no cure!” a woman cried. “There is no cure!”

The gravedigger, Famhan Condé, 26, was sweating. The grave, he said, would be the 26th he had dug since the epidemic began.

“We’re all scared here,” he said. “There’s no solution. We can do nothing. Only God can save us.”