>> narrator: tonight... >> an international public me hergency. >> narrator: amid the latest ebola epidemic... >> 10 to 15 new cases daily... >> narrator: frontline's investigatiointo the outbreak in west africa, five years ago. >> it's pure craziness, like watching a zombie movie. >> narrator: and the global failure to stop it... >> the world has neverng faced anythiike this, we've never prepared for . >> ebola was not an exception. ebola is a precedent. >> narrator: tonight on ebola is a precedent. >> narrator: tonight on frontline, "outbreak". >> frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbsik station from viewersyou. thank you. and by the corporation forro publiccasting.

major support is provided by the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. more information a macfound.org. the ford foundation: working withisionaries on the frontlines of social change worldwide. at fordfoundation.org. additional support is provided by the 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.st supporting trthy journalism that informs and inspires. and 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 down to market. i could hear and see the crowd of people screaming and shouting. (people shouting) i can see that he's afraid. i see he has picked up a rock and he's waving it around. he's followed by a lot of people, telling us, "you have to take him down. he is infecting our community. we don't know where he's going." (shouting continues) the pressure from the crowd is mounting. they're yelling at us. so the guys in the suits wrele him to the ground and li him into the back of the pickup.

it was like watching 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 dream? but no, it wasn't. it was for real.

>> narrator: in december 2013, the childr of meliandou village discovered hundreds of bats nesting in a hollow tree. they had no idea that bats are suspected of carrying a deadly virus. nody knows for sure but the villagers now think this is where it all began

(thunder rumbling) had killed one-year-ole oumanou.ed one-year-ole his sister died nine days later. then his mother fell ill. she was seven months pregnant.

>> narrator: a traditional healer gathered everyone together, including more family

members who had become sick. a villager filmed the ceremony >> narrator: the next , emile's grandmother, left the village to seek treatment. she infected a nurse at a local hospital. the sickness began to spread across the forest region of guinea, but for three months was mistaken for cholera and malaria. ru by march, the s had traveledan hundreds of miles killed more than 50 people. e government sent a team of scientts to investigate and take blood samples.

>> narrator: the doctor trackeda down a teenager med khalil, who was sick with the mystery disease. his colleague started filming on an ipad. (moaning)

>> narrator: khalil's blood would later be tested. the results: ebola.

>> narrator: the government guinea had no idea how to respond. all previous ebola outbreaks had s occurred over 1,000 mileay. but the relief group doctorsha without borderdecades of experience with ebola. within 48 hours, they set up a field hospital in the town of guéckédou, the epicenter of the outbreak.th e first patients began to arrive >> most of thoseases came from different villagesor ifferent areas in the city of guéckédou. er that's abad sign, because it means that you don't have just one cluster or one familyil or onege that is hit. it means that it's 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, and safely bury the dead. this complex operation needed a level of manpower and

coordination beyond the reurces of doctors without borders. >> i remember my headquarters asked me, "what do you think? is it five villages, or ten villages, or 15 villages, more?" and i remember i said, "if i have to choose between those three options, i do believe it's 15 or more."an i said, like, "i think we have a big problem." >> narrator: the world health organization, who, is part of the united nations and has a mandate to help governments coordinate their responseto utbreaks. disease that we have diths a for a number of decades before," inand you know, in our own we had the idea that ebolawa was something whicsevere, but typically occurred in a certain way anthen could be handled. but at that time, we didn't really know how complex it was going to become. >> narrator: the who left the response in the hands of i

officials in guinea, who had no experience of ebola.th set up what would become ily meetings with the government of guinea, doctors without borders, and otr aid organizations. >> those daily meetingsve were a nightmare day, day after day. disorganized meetings, no at they were talking about.ing the level required for thenot job. their coordinator never woed on ebola before, and who wasns really ding the scale of the epidemic. immediately, i thought, "those people are useless. they don't even understand whate theyupposed to do here." >> who, although it's a very important technical agency, our powers are limed when we are operating in countries. the countries take the lead, we advise honestly, and this is

what we tried to do in guinea. >> narrator: the outbreak quickly spread 400iles to guinea's capital, conakry doctors without borders' top ebola expert spoke out. >> nartor: the government of guinea accused the group of sowing pan.

>> narrar: the ministry of health now ordered its teams in the field to include only laboratory-confirmed cases of ebola in their death count. tr

>> narrator: the minof health teams now stopped investigating deaths that weren't confirmed ebola cases. some of those deaths were invi ages right on the international border between guinea and sierra leone. c locass freely between the countries every day. louise kamano lived in sierra leone, but in march, she came to stay with relatives in guinea. her mother had ebola and hadal ady crossed the border twice since she got infected.

>> nrator: when louise fell sick too, she was frightened by rumors that foreign doctors were killing people. >> narrator: louise walked through the bush until she reached a river: the border with sierra one. there were no eckpoints, no immigration police. >> narrator: like her mother the border carrying the sickness

with her.it no one kneet, but ebola was spreading in sierra leone. eya few days after her jou the who got a tip-off that louise was sick and had crossed into sierra leon louise's name and location were logged in an internal report and passed on to the siea leone government. attention of the sierreto the government, and they came back and told us that louise had gone back to guinea and 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 formed about louise. what's certain is that ebola was soon spreading through her home village.se one of to fall sick was a renowned traditional healer known as mendinor. >> narrator: on april 8, mendinor died, and her body was prepared for burial. the corpse of an ebola victim is highly infectious, but in west africa, it's customary for villagers to spend hours washing and preparing the body for the funeral.

>> narrator: these traditional joburial practices played r role in the read of the virus. o mourneften touch the body at the feral itself. >> narrator: the healer's

funeral was a catastrophe. it set off a chain reaction ofct infens that would lead to thousands of deaths.as the outbreaklready raging in guinea, and now it began to spread unchecked through the villages of sierra leone, ping out entire families. the healer's niece even took the virus 250 miles to monrovia, the capital of liberia. nobody yet knew it, but the outbreak was completely out of control. for re than a month, the government of sierra leone missed the deaths in its border 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 researching tropical diseases.ta mebiota had no experience in controlling ebola outbreaks. >> i said, "this outbreak will not last more than a few weeks." and that was after we identified the first wee the first two weeks, we said, "okay, that's a normal outbreak. we are confident it will be ove" in two month >> we were getting advice frometabiota, and complacenc set in.wh can i say? yes, it was ebola, but theno magnitude hahit us. so we took sps 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 ste hospital in the town of kenema, which already

had a ward for lassa fever, a disease similar to ebola but less infectious. but within days, the hospil was overrun with patients. then the nurses started to die. (crying) >> if you go to the morgue, you see dead bodies, 15, 1617, 18 dead bodies all in body bags. then i start to wonder, "what is happening?" i maybe ththe end of the world. maybe everybody's going to die. >> narrator: far from containin the outbreake 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 theath and sometimes

next to the path. they were smelling quite bad until the burial team came, and it might take days. g i was constantlyobsmacked that this wasn't a bigger deal. like, people weren't... you know, this wasn't being shouted out. >> narrator: the government called in doctors without borders. the plan was to build a dedicated eba clinic in the neighboring district. the group says that the government and their advisors, metabiota, were still underestimating the scale ofob the prlem. >> do you think metabiota was

the right organization to be doing outbreak response? ts no, we're not specialis in outbreak respon. 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 and metabiota had no system inlace to monitor people who had been in contact with ebola victims. this lack of contact tracing meant that hundreds of cases went undetected. >> and a month is a disaster. >> a disaster, yes. we wasted time.

>> it was wrong, yeah. >> narrator: the outbreak had now spread to three countries:ra guinea, sieone, and nations in the world.poorest four neighboring countries risked infectiont any moment. the who was considering declaring an intertional health emergency, which would have acted as a global distress signal.on but officials were crned about causing panic. i >> at that time,hink 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 entirely different. i'd probably be standing up and calling my director generalp and sayingase do it." >> narrator: the who openedon

a new coordinatienter in guinea to tryo improve the response across west africa. >> there was absolutelyld no change at fieevel. still the very same few organizations on the ground doing the work. no additional people coming to sport. more people at coordination level, more useless people, more meetings to be organized. but on the ground, on thfield, impact: zero. >> narrator: kenema hospital in sierra leone was now overwhelmed. the who had sent two doctors to help with the caseload. mibut the patients kept co, and the nurses kept getting infected t >> ink you'd have to be crazy to tnk that anything

but shutting that place 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 happened, there's a whole cohort of nurses, lab techs, and cleaners that wouldn't have many lives would have been saved. (crowd shouting) >> narrator: there were now sony maeaths at the hospital that wild rors started to spread through the town. >> this crazy woman came out and stood right at the centerin of the town the marketplace and started shouting, "there is no ebola!" >> this woman was shouting, "i am a nurse! i am telling you peoe that we are just doing cannibalism.

we are the ones that are killing people. we are removing their parts." th >> and everybodye marketplace, they go haywire running, "oh, theris no ebola! a nurse is confessing that there is no ebola. come and see the nurse, comed e, a nurse is confessing." now everybody started throwing stones at us. they said, "we are going to the hospital, we are going to burn the kenema government hospital down." >> i was walking up to the unit, and there was this stream of nurses and lab techs walking at a very hurried pace past me t he other direction. and i coulhear this mob, an angry mob. and the who, they all ted,. so they got into their cars and drovf, leaving just a handful of people probably

inside the whole hospitalen really, wh there was a risk of unthe hospital being overr. n arrator: the police usedhe tear gas to disper crowd. re the ets went quiet, for now. but sierra leone was on the brink of chaos. the outbreak had now killed more than 800 people in three countries. as the death count rose, doctors without borders had been urging the who to declare an international emergency. >> i said that i've been telling the world for the last few months that it's anun ecedented, out-of-control ebola epidemic. i don't have the authority, people don't listen to me, but you, you need to step up and declare it, because you

have the authority and you have the legitimacy. >> we felt that if you simply go around and say things are out of control or they're this way or whatever in a categorical way, it really doesn't help. and at this timewe knew that we had something which was not ordinary, but we were not dealing yewith the full-blown, you know, global crisis. >> narrator: then 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 headlinesr nd the world. >> we're just getting word i 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 currentvi outbreak of ebola rus diseaseer

a public health ncy of international concern. the committee acknowledges the serious and unusual nature ofth outbreak and the potential for further international spad. >> narrator: the who now put a high-level team in geneva in charge of the response. they came up with a plan that would require thousands of western medics and experts to be put into action. >> we were looking at one of the most dangerous pathogens, that we knowing at an exponential rate across a broad geographic area, something we 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.t and i realized, apacity to manage something on this scale doesn't exist. >> narrator: the problem was, the who had no standing army of emergency medics d no

authority or budt for this kind of operation. they now needed to persuade wealthy countries to send people to fight the outbreak. and that would take time. back in west africa, the virus had found a new hunting ground: west point slum, the most densely populated district of monrovia, the cital of liberia.

>> i was called by the minister of health to say that people were dying. total, total confusion, chaos, disbelief, fear. no means of response because we didn't have the knowledge,we didn't have the equipment,

we didn't have the means whereby we could attend to people. we did not have full awareness of how quickly this disease could spread, how deadly this disease wa we were confounded becausesp it just read so rapidly in these communities. >> narrator: monrovia had 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 point as a makeshift isolation cente for suspected ebola cases.ad finda, whose husbandust with her six children, evenre though none of them appeared to be sick

>> narrator: a local journalist filmed finda and her children t isolation center. there was no separation between the sick and the healthy. very quickly, finda's son sasko fell sick. >> narrator: outside, crowdsat were protesting the slum ng dumping ground for monrovia's ebola victims and once again, rumors were

spreading that ebola was a hoax, a conspiracy to kill poor africans. four days after it opened, the isolation cent was overrun. (people shouting) >> at the time he was dead, they placed the body on the ground and removed the mattress. and they saw the blood on the floor, they saw fluids'r on the floor, and th marching the floor with their feet. >> narrator: the looters took

mattresses and sheets contaminated with the virus, and the ebola victims disappeared back into the slums. >> narrator: west int was now out of conol. (sirens, gunfire) >> fellow citizens, it has become necessary to impose additional sanctions. the communities of west point in monrovia are quarantined on a full security watch. this means there will be no movement in and ouof those areas. we ordered the military

touarantine the place, to stop anybody from leaving. our fear was people would runnd awayome from there and then go into other communities. that's why we did that. (gunfire) >> narrator: the quarantineme backfired diately. the army shot a teenage boy, who later died from his wounds. go except the streets,whereto so the virus was spreading. more quick by now, one of finda's children, sasko, was dead. the rest desperately needed help.

>> narrator: as westoint descended into chaos, doctors without borders had been constructi elwa 3, the biggest ebola hospital ever built. but when it opened, it wasld immediately clear not be enough. brett adamson was the fieldfo coordinatothe clinic. yi

>> people were outside, families were dying in taxi cabs outside. they were arring seeking care. the families had nowhere else to go, the center was full, and essentially, they were waiting... the center was waiting for someone to die to then make space. >> narrator: stefan liljegrencr was uited on short notice to work athe clinic. he had no ebola experience. e>> i arrive and there ar mattresses just next to each other full of people and they're "okay, so that's how a deadd, person looks like." they're telling me that "sfan, we can't just watch. we need to go in and move bodies are you ready for it?" and i start to panic, and my pulse goes very high. there are dead bodies in there,

and in gruesome positions. 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 withhe spray goes up and he starts spraying his face, and that's when it really hits you, he's really dead. and we place out the body bag anzip him up, and we carry and family are crying and screaming and yelling, and many are in panic. that was my first day with ebola. >> a normal medical round fome would be going in, pronouncing five or six people dead, because people are dyingble sometimes very distressing deaths beside a child. the mother that was trying to care for her child dead,

byand then you've got a ba and trying to work out, "h on earth are you going to try and deal with an unaccompaniedil chd in an over-full center?" it was really hard. it was just so far beyonwhat could rmally 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 can come away from something and feel a degree of satisfaction knowg 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. it was about feeling the sha of what the world had to offer for liberia at that time, and yeah, the sheer number

of deaths. it was just really seeindeath, yeah. >> narrator: after sleeping on the streets for fi days, finda and her surviving children were bulance crew in west point. (siren wailing) they were taken to the new clinic, but when they arrived, there was no room for them. to >> it's just crazytand there and look in the facehe of people and tellthat there is no space.re it's surreally surreal.

if you had to ma a choice, who do you take?me if i have to takone, i have to take this womane who lies on ound here. she is very, very sick, and if i have to take someone,ve i o take her. i can't take you. there is no space for you here today. >> narrator: eventually, the doctors without boers team found room for finda and her children. but by now, finda's youngest boy, tamba, was slipping away. >> narrator: eventually, finda

would lose three of her children. three survived. by now, ebola cases were ring exponentially. doctors without bords 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 the ebola clinic in monrovia to see the situation for himself. >> i still get goose bumps thinking about it, and i will never rget the experience. in elwa 3, i saw a level of seen.tation that i have never i went into one of the tents ana thera woman lying on the ground. she had beautifullplaited hair. when i looked more closely, i

realized that she was dead, ande the staf too busy trying to care for the living to even remove her. it was seeing a countryin essentiall free-fall and knowing, knowing with certainty that no matter what we did, it was going to get a lot worset before it got . >> narrator: tom frieden called president obama. >> i was frankly furious. what i said was that this isn't about response in the next three months, it's response in the m next three days thters. cases were increasing exponentially, they were doubling every three weeks. each month of delay would result in a tripling of cases. >> the world still has an opportunity to save countless live right now, the world has a responsibility to act, to step up, and to do more. >> narrator: ten months after the outbreak had begun, the fight back was underway.

the united states sent in and other countries followed suit. the unit nations created a new emergency mission of the who and other agencies to coordite the response. work began building new treatment centers and training burial teams. but the outbreak was still ahead of the response and even threatened to spread beyond afca. >> the second health care worker in dallas has tested positive for the ebola viru >> public health officials confirm the first human-to-human transmission of ebola in the u.s. >> we definitely arrived too late. i was absolutely petrified itli would just be this, black plague with this inexorable spread across the continent. and beyo we were also deathly afraid that someone would get on a plane and go to dakar or jakarta

or johannesburg, somewhere, and landn an urban setting and ebola would get totally out of control. we didn't have a plan b. mo >> narrator: then, iovia, something extraordinary happened. cases began to drop sharply. >> when we saw the numbers starti to go down, i was really worried. it was cause for more concern than jubilation because the response still seemed sot inadequate tha was inconceivable that it could be successful. and of course the fear is that tiif people are not presen, that they were staying at home, which means if they're staying people, that then the ting more would bounce back in a much more dramatic way, and tt was the fear. >> narrator: but the drop in numbers was real.

with death all around them, liberians were changing how they lived their lives. they stopped trying to nurse their sick and began to bury their dead safely. >> the entire monrovia knew ebola was real, ebola kills,ll ebola's gonna e unless i do one or two things differently.hu there was fear. and they changed their behaviort in ways uddenly slowed down and took the heat out of this thing. and that's what turned it around-- liberians turned their country around. 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 behavioof the population and the massive international responseed gradually tuhe tide. the fight against ebola is still far from over. but health officialare already worrying >> sometimes, the world has got

to learn things the hard way. therare gonna be more of these, no matter what think. more and more new diseases are emerging. we've seen 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 pele have died. the true figure is believed to be much higr. >> 37 health workers died at the kenema government hospital here. 37, including doctors, nurses, porters, cleaners, security, lab technicians, 37 of them died in this hospital. >> nurse rebecca, alex smogboy, nancy yoko, sister barlou,

doctor khan, nurse alice, i.p. borry.

>> narrator: three decades ago in pennsylvania, "frontline" went inside the divide over abortion. s >> tis a life-size, model... >> narrator: now, we return to see what has changed on both side >> we realized, if we're ever going to outlaw abortion that we have to be able to help women who feel that's their onlyal rnative. >> because i'm a mother, i'm not supposed to be doing stuff like this right? '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 moref these, no matter what we think.

>> visit the frontline archive where you can stream more than 200 frontline documentaries. connect to the frontline community on facebook and twitter, and watch frontline anytime on the pbsvideo app or pbs.org/frontline. contributions to your pbsible by station from viewers like you. thanyou. and by the corporation for public broadcasting. major support is provided by the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. the ford foundation: working with visionaries on the frontlines of social change worldwide. at fordfoundation.org. additional sport is provided by the abrams foundation, committed to excellence in journalism the park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the john andelen glessner family trust. supporting trustworthy spires.ism that informs and

and by the frontline journalism fund,or with mupport from jon and jo ann hagler. captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> for more on this and other frontline programs, visit our webse at pbs.org/frontline. ♪ frontline's "outbreak" is available on dvd.bs to order visit shorg, or call 1-800-play-pbs. this program is also available on amazon prime video. ♪

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just 20 days ago, we were looking at huge skyscrapers >>yeah >>totally different enviornment >>i'm not only getting to go accrous the country, i'm getting the chance to like find my self in the process >>talking to the people who have gone through ha >>the advice that i've gotten, the stories that i've heard are with me forever now, and i'm prepared for whatever obsticales may come roadtrip nation: beating the odds is made possible by the act's center for equity in learning at act we have apeimple mission: helpinle achieve education and workplace success. e work to close gaps in equity, opportunity, and achievement. we believe everyone, regardless of their circumstances, deserves a fair chance to learn and grow for more information, visit equityinlearning.act.org.