Guéckédou (prefecture)

Location of the city and prefecture of Guéckédou in Guinea

Guéckédou is a prefecture in the Nzérékoré region in Guinea with about 413,000 inhabitants. Like all Guinean prefectures, it is named after its capital, Guéckédou .

The prefecture is located in the south of the country, on the border with Sierra Leone and Liberia , and covers an area of ​​4,157 km².

Reforestation nursery in Guéckédou

The influx of Sierra Leonean refugees during the civil war there was concentrated in Guéckédou . Liberians also fled here from the Liberian civil war ; both civil wars temporarily spread to Guéckédou. Since its end, some of the refugees have returned, while others have settled permanently in Guéckédou.

In the prefecture Guéckédou which took effect on 2 December 2013 Ebola fever on; the first patient, a two-year-old boy, died in the village of Méliandou on December 28, 2013. This resulted in an Ebola fever epidemic in 2013/14 , which was the largest Ebola outbreak to date. "The number of victims [...] could exceed the number of victims of all known outbreaks combined." It was probably caused by fruit bats. Guinea suffers from the personal, social and economic consequences for years afterwards, especially the affected villages and towns in forest Guinea .

Footnotes

1. ↑ bevölkerungsstatistik.de (2006)
2. ^ ^{A b} Frank Patalong: Patient Zero: Researchers reconstruct the way in which the Ebola epidemic was spread . Spiegel Online, August 10, 2014
3. ↑ Deadly virus: fruit bats are said to have triggered the Ebola epidemic . Spiegel Online, July 31, 2014.
   Deadly pathogens out of control: fruit bats probably caused the Ebola epidemic . n-tv.de, July 31, 2014.
4. ↑ Fabian Urech: Suffering from Ebola. The disease haunts the country of origin. The virus lives on in the mind. Four years after the Ebola epidemic, the people in Guinea, where the disaster originated, are still suffering from the consequences. Would the country be prepared for the virus to return? NZZ Zurich December 8, 2017, pp. 49–51