Monrovia--Heavily pregnant when she died, Fatimah Jakemah was bagged, bleached and carted off for cremation, one of dozens of new cases in the capital that week as Ebola tightened its grip on Liberia.
It was early September and the outbreak was about to mushroom into an emergency of historic proportions that would eventually see 4,700 deaths throughout the country.
Across town, Olivia Clark found herself handing another collection team her 18-month-old son, Aaron, who had slipped away a few hours earlier, too young to fight the deadly virus amplifying inside his tiny body.
Her husband was already dead and Red Cross trucks piled with bodies were becoming a familiar sight as Ebola stalked the capital's poorest neighbourhoods, terrorising families crammed into squalid slum housing.
Amid the horror, one case stood out as uniquely cruel.
In the quarantined hamlet of Ballajah, 150 kilometres (90 miles) away, 12-year-old Fatu Sherrif was locked into her home with her dead mother as panicked neighbours fled to the forest.
Her cries could be heard for several days by the few who had stayed in the abandoned village before she died alone, without food or water.
By October the situation was so bad that besieged Red Cross disposal teams had given up trying to separate Ebola victims from those who might have met other ends, following a government directive to "burn them all".
As Ebola set out on its murderous path through Liberia and its neighbours Guinea and Sierra Leone, credible medical experts were predicting worst case scenarios of more than a million cases and tens of thousands dead.
AFP
