U.S. actor Danny Glover said on Thursday he will be in Nigeria to star in a movie based on people who risked and sacrificed their lives to stop the spread of Ebola in Africa's most populous country. Glover said he is proud to take part in the film, called "93 Days," because of the achievements made by the real-life characters. Nigerian actress Bimbo Akintola will portray Dr. Stella Ameyo Adadevoh, who along with her team diagnosed the first Ebola case in Nigeria. Adadevoh put the patient under quarantine, and stubbornly refused to discharge the Liberian man who was sick with the infection despite pressure. Adadevoh eventually died along with three other hospital staff that had contracted the disease.
Her
actions ensured that the fast-spreading viral infection was quickly contained.
Glover will portray the director of the hospital where Adadevoh worked. Akintola said the movie is a story of how
Nigeria— a country where many institutions have weakened due to endemic
corruption and ethnic strife — triumphed over the spread of Ebola, which
ravaged her West African neighbors of Guinea, Sierra-Leone and Liberia
"Nigerians acted as one. There was nothing about you being from different
ethnicity or different political party, it was about Nigerians just standing up
and doing this incredible thing for Nigeria," Akintola said. She said the
movie will be about courage in the face of death.
"The
doctors at First Consult (hospital) didn't ask for an Ebola patient. They
weren't expecting it. But they stood up to the plate when it turned out the
patient had Ebola. No one run away. That is courage in the face of death,"
Akintola said. About 12,000 people fly out of Nigeria daily to different
corners of the globe, Akintola said, adding that an Ebola outbreak in Nigeria
would have had a devastating effect on the world. According to the World Health
Organization, news of the first Ebola case in Nigeria on July 23 last year
rocked public health communities all around the world. "Nigeria is
Africa's most populous country and its newest economic powerhouse. For a
disease outbreak, it is also a powder keg. The number of people living in Lagos
— around 21 million — is almost as large as the populations of Guinea, Liberia
and Sierra Leone combined,"
WHO said last year in a publication about the outbreak.
Lagos also is characterized by a large population living in
crowded and unsanitary conditions in many slums, it said. Thousands of people
move in and out of Lagos, Africa's largest city, every day, constantly looking
for work or markets for their products in a busy metropolis with frequent
traffic gridlocks, said WHO, adding that officials were worried how they would
manage to trace people who had come into contact with persons infected with
Ebola in order place them in isolation. "The last thing anyone in the
world wants to hear is the two words, 'Ebola' and 'Lagos' in the same
sentence," said WHO, quoting Jeffrey Hawkins, the United States Consul
General in Nigeria at the time.
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