A woman gets vaccinated at a health center in Conakry during the first clinical trials of the VSV-EBOV vaccine against the Ebola virus.CELLOU BINANI/AFP / Getty Images
Inside the main Ebola treatment centre in Guinea's capital, there is a big room that the doctors call "the aquarium." It has huge windows on all sides, allowing the medical staff to peer into the smaller adjoining rooms where the Ebola patients are sleeping in secure isolation. And these rooms never seem to be empty for very long.
When I visited the aquarium this month, two of the isolation rooms were occupied. One of the Ebola patients was a 13-year-old girl named M'mah, who was recovering well after two weeks of treatment. Another room was occupied by a new Ebola patient, a young woman who had just arrived that day. She seemed weak and exhausted.
There was also another new Ebola case: a 10-year-old girl named Fatmata. But she never reached the treatment centre. When she fell sick, all of the warning signs were ignored, and she went home to her rural village and died there. Only after her death did anyone think to test her for Ebola. Health officials called it a massive failure and launched an internal investigation to find out how the case had been missed.
In the aftermath of these latest two Ebola cases, health officials are struggling to track down 300 people who had been in contact with the infected people. Each of the 300 contacts was in danger of contracting the deadly virus and passing it on further.
Nearly two years after the Ebola outbreak began, the crisis persists. The World Health Organization had been hoping that the outbreak would be eliminated by the end of this year, but now it admits that its emergency response to the Ebola crisis will have to continue until the middle of 2016 at the earliest. Heightened vigilance will continue to the end of next year, without any reduction in the number of surveillance experts and doctors in the countries where Ebola struck.
Bruce Aylward, a senior WHO official, admitted this month that the Ebola epidemic is "not finished by a long shot." Laurence Sailly, emergency co-ordinator in Guinea for Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), has the same warning. "It's definitely not over," she said in an interview.
"We know from experience in other countries that this is the most difficult time of the crisis," Ms. Sailly said. "We're probably on the last chain of transmission for Guinea. It's difficult to keep the same level of attention here when the number of cases is decreasing."
And now a new complication has arrived to hinder the Ebola fight: political interference. In the streets of Conakry, the capital of Guinea, you would never imagine that the country is still facing an Ebola crisis. The streets are dominated instead by campaign advertising and election rallies for Guinea's ruling party, which is seeking victory in an Oct. 11 national election.
The president, Alpha Condé, wants only good news now, and he doesn't want Ebola to cast a shadow over his campaign. His government has been putting pressure on Ebola specialists, urging them to release treated Ebola patients as quickly as possible, according to sources in the international health community who spoke on condition of anonymity. And when the latest Ebola cases were discovered this month, the government's Ebola co-ordination centre refused to announce the news to the public because it would distract from Mr. Condé's election campaign, according to government officials who asked not to be identified. The cases were still disclosed in the WHO's own reporting data, but there was no government press release.
Mr. Condé should be in political trouble because of his poor handling of the Ebola crisis last year. Guinea was "ground zero" for the outbreak – the country where the first cases emerged. But when the Ebola epidemic began, Mr. Condé minimized the situation, denying it was serious. In March, 2014, when the crisis was still gathering momentum, he proclaimed that the government was reaching "final success" against Ebola. A few weeks later, he said the situation was "well under control" – even as the epidemic spread. In the end, Ebola killed more than 2,500 people in Guinea.
Despite his mishandling of the crisis, Mr. Condé is likely to win the election. With his dominance of the media and his control of financial and state resources, Mr. Condé seems headed to an easy victory. His posters and billboards are everywhere in the capital, lining the streets, sometimes with several huge billboards on the same traffic circle. Opposition advertising is almost impossible to find. Police shut down city streets for Mr. Condé's campaign rallies, while loudspeakers blare his campaign songs across the city. It's far from a fair contest.
Meanwhile, international groups such as MSF and Unicef are still as vigilant as ever, worried that Ebola could make a nasty return, even after the current outbreak is finally over.
"Despite the reduction in confirmed cases in Guinea over the last few months, Unicef and all partners will continue responding at emergency levels until this outbreak is completely over," said Timothy La Rose, a spokesman for Unicef in Guinea.
"This requires sustained support from donors to stamp Ebola out once and for all. The Ebola response won't truly be finished until we have a health system in Guinea that can handle any potential future cases. This means that the commitment to building a better health system must be supported well beyond the end of Ebola in West Africa."
Geoffrey York