Montgomery Response Transcript

Montgomery Response Transcript

MONTGOMERY: When the outbreak started back in December of 2013, it was no different than any other Ebola outbreak. In fact, when I was there in April 2014 in northern Liberia, we were going out to the rural communities providing education and they were clueless as to what Ebola was. They'd never seen it before. So we were educating the community in contact tracing and recognizing Ebola. Basically, classical epidemiology and classical Ebola response, and that's how it started. There was a lot of fear and a lot of anger in the community early on, and that continued all the way through I would say until at least July or August of 2014. Yeah, 2014. Was that--yeah, I guess that's right. Because I was there in April 2014, because it's November 2015 now. I was there and went back. I was there in April and went back in August and went back again in October.

Q: So many different stages of where it was at.

MONTGOMERY: Yeah. I went from when it was basically a typical Ebola response--and in fact, because I had worked in Viral Special Pathogens and I was on the continent, Stuart Nichol, the branch chief at the time, he called me up and he's like, "Hey, we need someone to go out. Would you mind going out? We need someone who's had some experience and we just need someone who's calm and knows how to do this." And I said, "Sure, I'll do it, no problem." So I went out and we actually set up teams there and worked with the local Ministry of Health and kind of helped them set up their response system there. It really didn't come into real, full operational mode until July, August, when Kevin DeCock went out and helped them set up their incident management system. But we were doing some of the initial investigations in Liberia working with our counterparts in Guinea because at the time there were no cases in Sierra Leone.