During the West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2014, the amount of surgery performed in Sierra Leone dropped dramatically. Hakon A. Balkon, MD described what happened to a clinical officer training program and the decrease in surgical care:
Early in the outbreak, a student assigned in Kenema, in the eastern region of Sierra Leone where Ebola Virus Disease was first identified, wrote:
June 12: With the trend of the Ebola outbreak, patients are not coming to the hospital so there is not much surgical activity. Very little PPE is found on the wards. We touch unknowingly confirmed cases and it happens almost everyday. I’m kindly requesting for a re-posting to another hospital. I’m worried for my safety, as no one knows who is infected or not. Secondary, no one knows when the epidemic will stop. By then, the skills I have acquired might disappear, so please sir, consider my re-posting. Above all I’m really worried about my safety as I’m almost every day feverish.
To read more, see Chapter 6 “How Ebola affected a clinical officer training program in Sierra Leone and the decline of surgical care” in Operation Ebola: Surgical care during the West African outbreak
Operation Health: A series of books on surgery and global health from Johns Hopkins University Press 