Sierra Leone is blessed with abundant natural resources but yet prone to environmental degradation due to the mining operations. Most often, the mining communities are faced with social tensions, as a result of the possible trade-off between the expected employment impact and the cost of mining operations to the environment. Over the past decades, the contribution of the mining sector to the de...

BACKGROUND There is a growing awareness of the importance of surgical disease within global health. We hypothesised that surgical disease in low income countries predominantly affects young adults and may therefore have a significant economic impact. METHODS We retrospectively reviewed all surgical admission data from two rural government district hospitals in two different sub-Saharan Africa...

In 2012, Sierra Leone experienced its worst cholera outbreak in over 15 years affecting 12 of the country's 13 districts. With limited diagnostic capability, particularly in bacterial culture, the cholera outbreak was initially confirmed by microbiological testing of clinical specimens outside of Sierra Leone. During 2012 - 2013, in direct response to the lack of diagnostic microbiology facilit...

In this new era of global health (see JPHP 29:4), we sense palpable enthusiasm in Sierra Leone. Americans come for undergraduate internships, medical student electives, and health professional opportunities; that is how we met. Over the past 3 years, we have found few people understand the health system dilemmas in the world’s poorest country. In America, records are on the internet and easily ...

This study provides the first assessment of decadal changes in mangrove extents in Sierra Leone. While significant advances have been made in mangrove mapping using remote sensing, no study has documented long-term changes in mangrove extents in Sierra Leone-one of the most vulnerable countries in West Africa. Such understanding is critical for devising regional management strategies that can s...

The global reference list of 100 core health indicators is a standard set of indicators published by the World Health Organization in 2015. We reviewed core health indicators in the public domain and in-country for Sierra Leone, the African continent and globally. Review objectives included assessing available sources, accessibility and feasibility of obtaining data and informing efforts to mon...

BACKGROUND Acute respiratory infections remain a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in Sierra Leone; however, similar to other African countries, little is known regarding the contribution of influenza. Routine influenza surveillance is thus a key element to improve understanding of the burden of acute respiratory infections in Africa. In 2011, the World Health Organization (WHO) funded t...

On January 14, 2016, the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation was notified that a buccal swab collected on January 12 from a deceased female aged 22 years (patient A) in Tonkolili District had tested positive for Ebola virus by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). The most recent case of Ebola virus disease (Ebola) in Sierra Leone had been reported 4 months earlie...

-THE Sierra Leone Rise, located in the east equatorial Atlantic. forms a discontinuous chain of seamounts as shallow as 2 km extending with a general NE-SW trend from near the Sierra Leone Coast of Africa, to the St Paul fracture zone near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (Fig. 1). The origin of this feature has remained a topic of discussion. Sheridan et al.' have hypothesised that the Sierra Leone Rise...

BACKGROUND In August 2014, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) in South Africa established a modular high-biosafety field Ebola diagnostic laboratory (SA FEDL) near Freetown, Sierra Leone in response to the rapidly increasing number of Ebola virus disease (EVD) cases. METHODS AND FINDINGS The SA FEDL operated in the Western Area of Sierra Leone, which remained a "hotspot" ...