Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2014, on 9 October, the day after Duncan’s death. The epidemic figures it cites (8,033 infected, 3,879 dead) are from early October 2014.
Let’s start with a reflection:
Thomas Eric Duncan became America’s “Ebola patient”: within a few days he was the first person diagnosed on US soil, the first person to die of Ebola in the US, and the first person to set off a public health alarm over this deadly disease.
He was also going to be the first person to face criminal charges in the United States (related to Ebola) for putting an entire country at risk.
But if Thomas Eric Duncan had not been able to board that plane from Liberia to the United States, today he would just be one more “nameless African” who died somewhere in Africa, someone you would never have heard of.
At the same time, Duncan has a story to tell, and it won’t leave you indifferent. It has been pieced together from various sources, based on the accounts of his relatives and major media outlets, and published by Business Insider. Duncan was about to live the best moment of his life, and now that will never happen.
Duncan was leaving Liberia for Dallas to be reunited with Louise Troh, the mother of his son, after they had been separated “not by choice” for 16 years. He boarded that plane intending to marry her and start a new life together. He also wanted to see his son graduate.
Duncan worked as a driver in Liberia, and before he caught the plane his boss asked him one last favour: to take his pregnant 19-year-old daughter to hospital. When they got there, the hospital had no means to treat her, so Duncan took her back home.
That favour for his boss ended up as international news, because we now know that the boss’s daughter was infected with Ebola and may have been the source of his infection. But Duncan didn’t know that. The 19-year-old he took to hospital has also died, without ever having her baby. But she is just one more statistic among the thousands of deaths in the country.
Duncan met Troh, the mother of his son, in 1990 in a refugee camp in Côte d’Ivoire, where they had both fled during Liberia’s brutal civil war. Although it is not known why he went 16 years without seeing his partner, everything suggests that he himself sent her somewhere safe, to the United States, specifically Dallas, intending to join her later.
But it took Duncan 16 years, and he missed his son’s childhood. They had not seen each other since 1998. They kept in occasional touch across the distance with the few means at their disposal, and they never gave up hope of marrying one day and leading a normal life.
We already know the rest of the story.
Duncan got through the airport’s Ebola screening. He had no symptoms at the time, and he did not know he had been in contact with someone infected with Ebola.
He was able to fulfil his dream of being reunited with the mother of his son 16 years later. They made plans, and I suppose they built new hopes together. But a week later Duncan began to have chills and went to the emergency room at the Dallas hospital.
According to CNN, Duncan told the nurse that he had recently been in West Africa, but that information was not fully passed on to the rest of the medical team, and Duncan was sent home with a diagnosis of a minor infection.
A few days later, his future wife called an ambulance because Duncan was showing more serious symptoms, such as vomiting and diarrhoea. The ambulance took him to the hospital, and that is how Duncan became the “Ebola patient”.
After he died, a Dallas official called his partner to tell her that Duncan had been planning a surprise marriage proposal.
*So far, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has infected 8,033 people and killed 3,879, most of them poor, “nameless Africans” in places with no means to deal with this epidemic. For some reason, Duncan is not just one more statistic among the African dead. Duncan’s illness did matter to the whole world. To the United States in particular.
Featured image: Hasteur, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
