Telegraph More than 5,000 have tested positive – including children – and at least 47 have died in Africa’s worst outbreak of the disease. Inside a quarantine zone on the edge of a military hospital, a 32-year-old man with lesions all over his body is losing his battle with disease.
Ibrahim Turay, a construction worker from the capital, Freetown, has a severe case of mpox, the virus formerly known as monkeypox that exploded in Sierra Leone earlier this year.
For more than a month he has been unable to overcome the infection because his immune system is compromised. A secondary infection has resisted every antibiotic available, leaving him in a horribly precarious position.
“My situation, it is getting worse – some areas are getting better, but there are more boils popping up all the time,” he said, referring to the lumps and blisters that continue to erupt all over him.