five years ago. >> it's pure craziness, like watching a zombie movie. >> narrator: and the globale fato stop it... >> the wld has never faced anything like this,ve we' never prepared for it. >>bola was not an exceptio eba is a precedent. >> narrator: tonight on frontline, "outbreak". >> frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. and by the corporation for public broadcasting. major support is provided by the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundati, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. the ford foundation: working with visionaries on the frontlinesf social change worldwide. at fordfoundation.org. additional support is provided by the abrams foundation, committed to exclence in journalism. the park foundation, dedicated to heightening publicc awareness tical issues. the john and helen glessner

family trust. supporting trustworthy journalism that informs and inspires. and by the frontline journalism fund, with major support from jon and jo ann hagler. >> i got a call saying that there is a walker on his way i could hear and see trowde of peoplscreaming and shouting. (people shouting) e' i can see thats afraid.ic i see he hasked up a rock d he's waving it around. by he's followed lot of people, telling us, .ou have to take him down he is infecting our mmunity.

oi don't know where he's g." (shouting continues) the pressure from the crowd is mounting. they're yelling at us. g so theuys in the suits wrestleto the ground and lift himof into the bac the pickup. wa it was liktching a zombie movie or something. it's just crazy, it's pure craziness. where am i? how did i end up here? was this just a bad eam? buno, it wasn't. it was for real.

>> narrator: in december 2013, the children of meliandou village discovered hundreds of e.ts nesting in a hollow t

they had no idea that deadly virus.ected of carrying nobody knows for sure but the villagers now think this is where it all began

(thuer rumbling) >> narrator: nobody knew what had killed one-year-old emile oumanou.ed one-year-old emile his sister died nine days later. then his mother fell ill. she was seven months pregnant.

healer gathered everyoonal amgether, including more fy members who had beco sick. a villager filmed the ceremony on his cell phone. >> narrator: the next victim, emile's grandmother, left the village to seek treatment.a she infected a nurlocal hospital.

the sickness began to spreadre across the forgion of guinea, but for three mohs was mistaken forholera and malaria. by march, the virus had traveled hundreds of miles and killed more than 50 people. the government sent a team of scientists to investigate and take blood samples. >> narrator: the doctor tracked down a teenager named khalil, who was sick with the mystery disease. his colleague started filming on an ipad.

(moaning)

>> narrator: khalil's bloodte would labe tested. the results: ebola. ar >> ntor: the government of guineaad no idea how to respond. all previous ebola outbreaks had occurred over 1,000 miles away. but the relief group doctors without borders has decades of experience with ebola. within 48 hours, they set up asp field hoal in the town of guécedou, the epicenter of th outbreak. the first patients began to arrive. >> most of those cases

came from dierent villages or different areas in the city of guéckédou. that's a very bad sign, becauset eans that you don't have just one cluster or one family or one village that is hit.it it means tha already spread out. >> narrator: past outbreaks had shown that the key to stopping ebola was to isolate the sick, monitor anyone who had contact with the infected, a safely bury the dead. this complex operation needed a level of manpower and coordination beyond the resources of doctors withouts. bo >> i remember my headquarters asked me, "what do you think? is it five villages, or ten villages, or 15 villages, or more?" and i remember iaid, "if i have to choose between those three options, i do believe it's 15 or more." and i said, like, "i think we have a big problem." >> narrator: the wld health organization, who, is part of thenited nations and has a mandate to help governments

codinate their response to outbreaks. we thought, "okay, here is a disease that we have dealt with for a number of decades before," and you know, in our own mind, we had the idea that ebola was something which was severe, but typically occurred in a certain way and then could be handled. but at that time, we didn't rely know how complex it w going to become. >> narrator: the whoeft thesp rese in the hands of its officials in guinea, who had no experience of ebola. they set up what would become daily meetings with the government of guinea, doctors without borders, and other aid organizations. >> those daily meetings were a nightmare every day, day after day. ng disorganized meeti no decision taken, no one knowing what they were talking about. the who people were really not at the level required for the

job. their coordinator never workedef on ebolae, and who was really downsizing the scale of the epidemic. immediately, i thought, "those people are useless. they don't even understand what they are supposed to do here." >> who, although it's a very ouportant technical agency powers are limited when we areer ing in countries. the countries take the lead, we advise hostly, and this is what we tried to do in guinea. >> narrator: the outbreakic kly spread 400 milesa' to guis capital, conakry. doctors without borders' top ebola expe spoke out.

>> narrator: the government of guinea accusedhe group of sowing panic. >> narrator: the ministry of health now ordered its teams in the field to include onlyrm laboratory-con cases of

ebola in their death count. >> narrator: the ministry of n health tea stopped investigating deaths that weren't confirmed ebola cases. some of those deaths were in villages right on the international border between guinea and sierra leone. locals cross freely between the countries every day.

louise kamano lived in sierra leone, but in march, she came t stay with relative guinea. her mother had ebola and had already crossed the border twice since she got infected. >> narrator: when louise fell siy too, she was frightened rumors that foreign doctors were killing peop. l

>> narratoouise walked through thbush until she reached a river: the border with sierra leone. there were no checkpoints, no immigration police. >> narrator: like her mother before her, louise had crossed the border carrying the sickness with her. no one knew it yet, but ebola was spreading in sierra leone. a few days after her journey, the who got a tip-off that louise was sick and had crossed into sierra leone.

louise's name anlocation were rtlogged in an internal rend vernment. to the sierra leone >> we did bring louise to the attention of the sierra leoneme gove, and they came back and told us that louise had gone back to guineand that she was not in sierra leone. that was the last that we heard of this particular case. >> narrator: the sierra leone government says it was never informed about louise.bo what's certain is thla was soon spreading through her home village. one of those to fall sick was a renowned traditional healer known as mendinor.

>> narrator: on april 8, mendinor died, and her body was prepared for bial.la highly infectious, butwestis africa, it's customary for asllagers to spend hours wng and preparing the body for the funeral. >> narrator: the traditional burial practices played a major role in the spread of the virus. mourners often touch the body at the funeral itself. r:

>> narrato the healer's neral was a catastrophe. it set off a chain reaction of infections that would lead to thousands of deaths. the outbreak was already raging in guinea, and now it began to spread unchecked through the villages of sierra leone, wiping out entire families. the healer's niece even took the virus 250 miles to monrovia, the capital of liberia. y nobody knew it, but thetb

ouak was completely out of control. for more than a month, the government of sierra leone miss the deaths in its borde villages. doctors without borders says it tried to get the government to pay attention. but sierra leone had turned for advice to an american company called metabiota, who had a long-standing presence in the country researchintropical diseases. metabiota had no experience in controlling ebola outbreaks. >> i said, "this outbreak wi not last more than a few weeks." and that was after we identified the first week. the first two eks, we said, "okay, that's a normal outbreak. we are confident it will be over in two months." >> we were getting advice

from metabiota, and complacency set in. what can i say? yes, it was ebola, but the magnitude had not hit us. so we took steps at that time that were advised by metabiota, but we never knew that it was going to be so big. >> narrator: the government decided to treat ebola victims at the state hospital in the town of kenema, which already had a ward for lassa fever, a disease similar to ebola but less infectious. th but wiin days, the hospitalie was overrun with pnts. then the nurses started to die. (crying) >> if you go to the morgue, you see dead bodies, 15, 16, 17, 18 dead bodies all in body bags.

then i start to wonder, "what is happening?" maybe this is the end. of the wor maybe everybody's going toie. >> narrator: far from containing the outbreak, the hospital was helping to spread it. will pooley, a british nurse, volunteered to work on the ebola ward. >> when a patient arrived, they'd walk in past these corpses that would be piling up across the path and sometimes next to the path. they were smelling quite badal until the bueam came, and it might take days. i was constantly gobsmacked that this sn't a bigger deal. like, people weren't... you know, this wasn't being shouted out. g >> narrator: ternment called in doctors without borders. the plan was to build a dedicated ebola clinicei in theboring district. the group says that the t

government andir advisors, metabiota, were still underestimating the scalof the problem. >> do you think metabiota was the right organization to bere doing ouak response? >> no, we're not specialists in outbreak response. we know how to do it because we have some kind of expertise in the domain, but we are too small, i mean, we are a very small company. >> narrator: the government andi metaa had no system in place to monitor people who had been inontact with ebola victim this lack of contact tracing

meant that hundreds of cases went undetected. >>.nd a month is a disaster >> a disaster, yes. we wasted time. >> it was wrg, yeah. >> narrator: the outbreak had now spread to three countries: guinea, sierra leone, and liberia, some of the poorest nations in the world. four neighboring countries the who was considering moment. declaring an international health emergency, which would have acted as a global disess signal.

but officials were concerned about causing panic. >> at that time, i think all of us thought, "wait a minute. let's be cautious, let's see how it evolves. we are deploying people in the field, we think we are making headways." with hindsight, if i went back to june 2014, i would probably be saying something entily different. i'd probably be standing up and calling my director general and saying, "please do it." >> narrator: the who opened a new coordination center in guinea to try to improveos the response acrwest africa. >> there was absolutely no change at field level.st ill the very same few organizations on the ground doing e work. no additional people coming to support.eo more pple at coordination level, more useless ople, more meetings to be organized. on buhe ground, on the field, impact: zero.

>> narrator: kenema hospital in sierra leone was now overwhelmed. the who had sent two doctors to help with the caseload. but the patients kept coming, and the nurses kept getting infected. >> i think you'd have to be crazy to think that anythingt but shutting thaace down would be the thing to do. and everyone knew that's what needed to happen, and that should have happened months before that, and had that have cohort of nurses, lab chs, and cleaners that wouldn't have died. so many lives would have been saved. (crowd shouting) >> nartor: there were now so many deaths at the hospital that wild rumors started to spreadwn through the to

>> this azy woman came out and stood right at the center of the town in the marketplace and started shouting, "there is no ebola!" >> this woman was shouting, "i am a nurse! i am telling you people that we .are just doing cannibali we are the ones that are killing people. we are removing their parts." >> and everybody in thepl markace, they go haywire, running, "oh, there is no ebola! a nurse is confessing that there is no ebola. co and see the nurse, come and see, a nurse is confessing." now everybody started throwingus stones a.

o ey said, "we are going tthe hospital, we are going to burn the kenema government hospital down." >> i was walking up to the unitr and there was this seam of nurses and lab techs walng at a very hurried paceast me in the other direction. and i could hear this mob, an angry mob. it's really unique sound. and the who, they all evacuated, so they got into their cars an drove off, leaving just a handful of people probably inside the whole hpital really, when there was a risk of the hospital being overrun. >> narrator: the police used tear gas to disperse the crowd. the streets went quiet, for now. but sierra leone was on the brink chaos. h the outbad now killedre

mo than 800 people in three cotries. as the death count rose, doctors without borders had been urging the o to declare an international emergency. >> i said that i've been telling the world for the last few nths that it's an unprecedented, out-of-control ebola epidemic. i don't ve the authority, people don't listen to me, but you, you need step up and declare it, because you have the authority and you have the legitimacy. >> wfelt that if you simply go around and say things are out of control or they'reer this way or whatn a categorical way, it really doesn't help. and at this time, we knew that we had something which was not ordinary, but we were not dealing yet with the full-blown, you know, global crisis. >> narrator: tn the outbreak moved to another level. an infected liberian took the

virus to nigeria, africa's most populous country. and two american health workers forced ebola into the headlines around the world.>> e're just getting word in from the cdc, it's confirmed the first ebola case diagnosed. >> two infected missionaries flown from liberia and in isolation at an atlanta hospital... >> narrator: the who declared an international emergency. >> i am declaring the current outbreak of ebola virus disease a public health emergency of international concern. the committee acknowledges the serious and unusual nature of the outbreak and the potential for further international spread.ra >> nr: the who now put a high-level team in geneva in charge of the response. they came up with plan that would require thousands of western medics and experts to be put into action.

>> we were looking at one of the most dangerous patgens that we knew, growing at an exponential rate across a broad eographic area, something had never seen before. we needed clinical management people to go in there and manage the ebola cases. we needed public health expertise on the ground to be able to do the contact tracing. and i realized, that capacity to manage something on this scale doesn't exist. n >>arrator: the problem was, the who had no standing army of emergency medics and no authority or budget for thiski of operation. theyow needed to persuade wealthy countries to send ople to fight the outeak. and that would take time. back in we africa, the virus had found a new hunting ground:t west plum, the most monrovia, the capitalrict

of liberia.

>> i was called by theinister of health to say that peop were dying. total, total confusion, chaos, disbelief, fear. no means of response because we didn't have the knoedge, we didn't have the equipment, we didn't have the means whereby we could attend to people. we did notave full awareness of how quickly this disease could spread, how deadly this disease was. we were confounded because it just spread so rapidly in these communities. >> narrator: monrovia d one small ebola clinic, and it was full.

for the infected, there was nowhere to go. the government decided to use a school in west pointhi as a mak isolation center for suspected ebola cases. finda, whose husband had just died, was forced to come here with her six children, even though none of them appeared to be sick. oc >> narrator: a journalist filmed finda and her children in the isolation center. there was no separation between the sick and theealthy. very quickly, finda's son sasko fell sick.

>> narrator: outside, crowds were protesting that the slum was becoming a dumping groundov for monria's ebola victims. and once again, rumors were spreading that ebola was a hoax, a copiracy to kill poor africans. four days afr it opened, the (people shouting)was overrun. wa

>> at the time hs dead, they placed the body on the ground and removed the maress. and they sawhe blood on the floor, they saw fluids on the floor, and they're marching the floor with their feet. >> narrator: the loors took mattresses and sheetsed contamin with the virus, d the ebola victims disappeared back into e slums. >> narrator: west point was now out of control. (sirens, gunfire)

>> fellow citizens, it hases become nsary to impose additional sanctions. te communities of west po in monrovia are quarantined on a full securi watch. this means there will be no movement in and out of those areas. we oered the military to quarantine the place, to stop anybody fr leaving. our fear was people would run away and come from there and then go into other communities. that's why we did that. unfire) >> narrator: the quarantine backfired immediately.

the army shoa teenage boy,m who later diedhis wounds. and the infected had now to go except the streets, so the virus was spreading more quickly. by now, one of finda's children, sasko, was dead. the rest desperately needed help. >>

arrator: as west point descended into chaos, doctors without borders had been constructing elwa 3, the biggest ebola hospital ever built. but when it opened, it was immediately clear it would not be enough. brett adamson was the field coordinator for the clinic. >> people were dying outside, families were dying in taxi cabs outside. they were arriving seeking care. the families had nowhere else to go, the center was full, and essentially, they werein wa.. the center was waiting for someone to die to thenpa make. >> narrator: stefan liljegren was recruited on short notice to work at the clinic.eb he had no a experience.

>> i arrive and there are mattresses just next to each other full of ople and they're dead, and i look at them and, "okay, so that's how a dead person looks like." they're telling me that "stefan, we can't just watch. we need to go in and move bodies. are u ready for it?" and i start to panic, and my pulse goes very high. there are de bodies in there,om and in grupositions. we go to the next one, and there are dead bodies in there as well. and we go up to a man in a chair. the guy with the spray goes upyi and he starts spra his face, and that's when it reay hits you, he's really dead. and we place out the body bag and zip him up, and we carry him away. and family are crying and screaming and yelling,ni

and many are in that was my first day with ebola. or >> amal medical round for me would be going in, pronouncing five or six people dead, and it's extremely horrible because people are dying sometimes very distressing deaths beside a child. the mother that was trying to care for her child dead, and then you've got a baby, and trying to work out, "how on earth are you going to try and deal with an unaccompanied child in an over-full center?" it was really hard. was just so far beyond what could normally be expected of humanitarian workers, i would say. the pointlessness of it,

that's what it felt like. normally, if you work to the point of exhaustion, you c come away from something and feel a degree of satisfaction knowing that you did what you could. i didn't feel any satisfaction at all. it was never about feeling like you'd failed in the level of medical acuity. we did everything we could.bo it was feeling the shame of what the world had to offer for liberia at that time, and yeah, the sheer number of deaths.as itust really seeing death, yeah. >> narrator: after sleeping on the streets for five days, findn and her survivchildren were finally pick up by an ambulance crew in west point. (siren wailing) they were ken to the new clinic, but when they arrived, there was no room for them.

>> it's just crazy, to stand there and look in the face of people and tell them that there is no space. it's surreal, really surreal. if you had to make a choice, who do you take? if i have to take someone, i have to take this woman who lies on the ground here. she is very, very sick, and if i have to take someone, i have to take her.i n't take you. there is no space for you here today. >> narrator: eventually, the doctors without borders team a found room for fin her children. but by now, finda's youngest boy, tamba, was slipping away.

>> narrator: eventually, finda woullose three of her children. three survived. , by nola cases were rising exponentially.do ors without borders made a direct plea to the united states to provide thousands of soldiers to help isolate and treat patients.

the director of the u.s. centers for disease control and prevention came to the ebola clinic in monrovia to see the situation for himself. >> i still get gooseumps thinking about it, and i will never forget the experience. in elwa 3, i saw a level of devastation that i have never seen. i went into one of the tents and there was a woman lying on the ground. she had beautifully plaited hair when i looked more closely, i realized that she was dead, and the staff were too busy trying to care for the living to even remove her. it was seeing a country essentially in free-fall and knowing, knowing with certainty that no matter what we did, it was going to get a lot worse before it got better. >> narrator: tom frieden called president obama. >> ias frankly furious. what i said was that this isn't about response in the next three months, it's response in the

next three days that matters. cases were increasing exponentially, they were doubling eve three weeks. each month of delay would result in a tripling of cases. >> the wld still has an opportunity to save countless lives. right now, the world has a responsibility to act, to step up, and to do more. r narrator: ten months af the outbreak had begun, the fight back was underway. the united states sent in thousands of troops and medics, and other countries followed suit. the united nations created a nef emergency missiohe who and other agencies to coordinate the response.rk egan building new treatment centers and training burial teams. but the outbreak was sti ahead of the response and even threatened to spread beyond africa. >> the second health care worker

in dallas has tested positive for the ebola virus. >> plic health officials confirm the first human-to-human transmission of ebola in the u.s. >> we definitely arrived too late. i was absolutely petrified it would just be this, like, black plague with this inexorable spad across the continent and beyond. we were also deathly afraid that someone would get on a plane johannesburg, somewhere,a and land in an urban setting and ebola would get totally out of control. we didn't have a plan b. >> narrator: then, in monrovia, something extraordinary happened cases began to dp sharply. >> when we saw the numbers starting to go down, i was

really worried.or it was cause more concern thanubilation because the response still seemed so inadequate that it wasco nceivable that it could be successful. and of course the fear is that if people are not presenting, that they were staying at home, which means if they're staying at home, they're infecting more people, that then the curve would bounce back in a much more dramatic way, and that was the fear. >> narrator: but the dropea in numbers was with death all around them,g liberians were chang how they lived their lives.in they stopped tg to nurse theisick and began to bury their dead safely. >> the entire monrovia knew ebola was real, ebola kills, ebola's gonna kill me unless i do one or two things differtly. there was a huge fear. and they changed their behaviors in ways that suddenly slowed down and took the heat out of thishing.

and that's what turned it around-- liberians turned theiru country . we got in there a little bit afterward and took a lot of credit >> narrator: thousands more were still to die across west africa. but the changing behavior of the population and the massive international response gradually turned the tide. the fight against ebola is still far from over. but health officials are already worrying about the next outbreak, and >> sometimes, the world has got to learn things the hard way. there are gonna be more of these, no matter what we think. more and more new diseases are emerging. we've en pandemic flu, we've seen sars, we've seen ebola like this, and we are not prepared. ebola was not an exception, ebola is a precedent. >> narrator: officially, more than 10,000 people have died.

the true figure is believed to be much higher. >> 37 health workers died at the kenema government spital here. 37, including doctors, nurses, porters, cleaners, security, lab technicians, 37 of them died in this hospital. >> nse rebecca, alex smogboy nancy yoko, sister barlou, doctor khan, nurse alice, i.p. borry. t

>> narrator:ee decades ago in pennsylvania, "frontline" went inside the divide over abortion. >> this is a life-size, model... >> narrator: now, we return to see what has changed on both sides. >> we realized, if we're everon going to outlaw aborhat we have to be able to help women who feel that's their only alternative.

>> because i'm a mother, i'm not supposed to be doing stuff like this right? it's not that simple though. >> some patients are like, "i don't want to be doing this, but it is the right choice for me." only they know what they should do. >> go to pbs.org/frontline for the latest on the current ebola outbreak in the democratic republic of congo, and find out more about the difficulty of stopping ebola. >> there are gonna be more of n thesmatter what we think. >> visit the frontline archive where you can ream more than 200 frontline documentaries. connect to the frontline community on facebook and w twitter, ach frontline anytime on the pbsvideo app oron pbs.org/frtline. >> frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. and the corporation for public broadcasting. major support is provided by thd joand catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed

to building a more jus verdant and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. the ford foundation: working with visionaries on the frontlines of social change worldwide.at at fordfoun.org. additional support is provided byhe abrams foundation, committed to excellence in journalism. the park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the john and helen glessner family trust. supporting trustworthy jonalism that informs and inspires. and by the frontline journalism fund, ann hagler.upport from jon and captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> for more on this and other frontline programs, visit our website at pbs.org/frontline.

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