Thursday  11 June  / Hour 1, Block C: Clair MacDougall, West Africa resident and reporter, free-lance correspondent in Liberia and Sierra Leone for the past year; in re:  Epidemic overwhelmed a region. We spoke with her in August 2014 in Monrovia; collapse of governance.  Hospital ceased t function since the govt wouldn’t guarantee welfare for workers's families if the workers died. Te in West Point there was a shooting.   A slogan to enist public engagement: "Ebola is real."  Until then, many citizens thought perhaps the ebola scare was bogus; not a lot of trust in the govt historically – a civil war, then before that a ruling elite that robbed the country blind.  NGOs decided not to quarantine people, educated people about ebola. Where was the WHO – the World Health Organization?   Early on, its regional ofc neglected to respond; only five months later that an intl health emergency was declared.  The WHO is a political patronage organization, a nice Hong Kong lady. It was politically useful to declare ebola solved – it wasn’t.  The word thought the WHO was protecting the world, when in fact it was protecting its jobs.  Finally, the situation turned around after individuals were empowered with information.   Ebola is opportunistic: it goes to the weakest, so it prospers under bad governance.  Borders are porous; Liberia suffered two epidemics, one from Guinea and one from Sierra Leone.  Clair lived through the plague year.  Currently MER is in Korea, where there's not camel except n a zoo.  How did Clair survive? Some months were worse than others.