RAPHAEL SATTER & MARIA CHENG
March 7, 2016
WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. company assigned a crucial role in the efforts to battle Ebola in Sierra Leone made a series of costly mistakes during the 2014 outbreak, an Associated Press investigation has found.
Staffers with the San Francisco-based company Metabiota Inc. not only misread the epidemic, they contributed to botched lab results, undermined partners and put people at risk of the terrifying virus, according to leaked documents and interviews with international health responders.
The company had been tapped by the World Health Organization and the Sierra Leonean government to help fight Ebola. But internal emails from WHO and other international health agencies obtained by AP show that senior scientists were alarmed at a spate of problems in a lab shared by Metabiota and Tulane University.
“This is a situation that WHO can no longer endorse,” WHO outbreak expert Dr. Eric Bertherat wrote in a July 17, 2014, email to colleagues.
Bertherat relayed reports of “total confusion” in the government lab split between Metabiota and Tulane at the Kenema hospital in Sierra Leone, noting there was “no tracking of the samples” and “absolutely no control on what is being done.” He said the flubbed results were particularly dangerous given suspicion among the local population that international workers were spreading Ebola deliberately.
