Too Close to Ebola

She was bleeding from everywhere. There was blood in her urine, blood in her stool. She had blood-streaked sputum and bloody vomit. As we doctors huddled around her bed, blood was trickling from her nose.We were not gathered around a patient in some hushed room in an intensive care unit. Outside, I could hear children screaming, laughing, and the sounds of diesel trucks laboring down the nearby road. I was working for the medical relief group World Vision in St. Mary's Hospital Lacor, a 460-bed missionary hospital in the small farming town of Gulu in northern Uganda. Everything was different here. And I had no idea what was wrong with this woman. Doctors base their diagnosis on what's common in the community. In the United States, a doctor finding an enlarged spleen in a reasonably healthy young woman would suspect mononucleosis. In South America, a doctor might consider Chagas' disease; ...