Ebola was one of the major global crises of 2014, and Erika Check Hayden pursued the story of this crisis all the way to Sierra Leone, one of the three countries hit hardest by the outbreak. Erika’s beat at Nature encompasses infectious disease, and she drew on her many years of experience on that beat in her coverage of the epidemic.
Erika’s feature, “Ebola’s lost ward,” told the story of an international team of doctors and scientists that fought to conduct potentially lifesaving research on Ebola even as the disease claimed the lives of their colleagues in Sierra Leone. “Ebola’s lost ward” helped convince the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to fund Erika to travel to Sierra Leone in December, where she covered a wide range of stories on the outbreak response, including three that are part of this submission.
“Ebola threatens a way of life” provided a front-line account of how cultural practices complicated the Ebola fight in one district of Sierra Leone. “
In Sierra Leone, nurses who survive Ebola return to help others” reported on how nurses in that district are shunned by their communities even as they work to save patients from the disease that threatened their own lives.
And in “On the front lines of Ebola’s most pressing mystery,” Erika reported on how the team she covered in “Ebola’s lost ward” has begun new research to develop drugs to treat the disease.
Erika also shot footage for two videos that accompanied her stories, including one from a quarantined village in Sierra Leone.
Altogether, Erika’s work offers an unparalleled and multidimensional portrayal of the Ebola outbreak of 2014. Her work sheds light on the factors that are driving the epidemic, the devastating toll it has taken on health care workers and medical researchers, and the courage of those who continue to fight this outbreak and work to prepare for future ones.