![]() ![]() "The enemy is disguised in a way as an ordinary person that you would never be able to distinguish from anybody else. "The enemy is not readily identifiable," he says. He says he sees parallels with a militant insurgency. Muller has photographed wars and conflict around the world, but this is his first time covering a bona fide outbreak. He finally managed to get out aboard a government flight carrying a World Health Organization official. He got into Kenya after nearly getting stuck in Sierra Leone after air travel was cancelled. Muller spoke to WIRED just after returning to Nairobi. It was a careful balance between safety and access, he said, but "I’m not particularly keen on doing things that I think expose me to great, great risk.” Relief workers insisted he remain about six feet away from them, which allowed him to get close enough to make intimate pictures without undue risk of exposure. Muller's own safety was a concern, of course. In some instances, these burial teams are being called to go through all of these very cumbersome and isolating procedures to get rid of a body, and you’ll have members of the family or members of the community that are quite certain this person didn’t die from Ebola.” "There's frustration, too, in the fact that the government of Sierra Leone has mandated that all deaths that aren’t clearly attributable to some particular cause be treated as potential Ebola cases. “People are in a state of serious fear in these affected areas as is, and then you have deaths," he says. His gripping photographs of burial teams, armed checkpoints and villages living with the virus in their midst put a human face on what is, for many, a seemingly abstract and distant story. ![]() Muller recently covered the outbreak for the Washington Post in the Kailahun District of Sierra Leone, the region of the country hardest hit. More than 3,700 people have been infected so far, and about half have died. Since its appearance in Guinea in May, the contagion has spread to neighboring Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. It's only through the work of photographers like Pete Muller that we can glimpse what life is like for communities struggling to cope with the deadliest outbreak since the virus was discovered in 1976. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa has left much of the region quarantined and inaccessible, making the tragedy seem all the more distant. ![]()
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