Lack of Mobile Ebola Test Harms Effort in West Africa
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The largest Ebola diagnostic lab in Liberia, housed in a shabby brick building 65 miles (105 kilometers) east of the capital Monrovia, can test about 80 to 90 blood samples a day.
Sometimes it takes two days for the samples taken from patients to arrive there, often in worn coolers carried on motorbike. By then, healthy people awaiting results may have been confined to virus-ridden Ebola wards. Sick people could have been accidentally diagnosed with other, less-harmful diseases and sent back, contagious, into healthy communities.