Firestone Plantation

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When it comes to Ebola, the rubber met the road at the Firestone rubber plantation in Harbel, Liberia.

Firestone detected its first Ebola case on March 30, when an employee's wife arrived from northern Liberia. She'd been caring for a disease-stricken woman and was herself diagnosed with the disease. Since then Firestone has done a remarkable job of keeping the virus at bay. Its built its own treatment center and set up a comprehensive response that's managed to quickly stop transmission.

Currently the only Ebola cases on the sprawling, 185-square-mile plantation are in patients who come from neighboring towns.

When the Ebola case was diagnosed, "we went in to crisis mode," recalls Ed Garcia, the managing director of Firestone Liberia. He redirected his entire management structure toward Ebola.

Garcia's team first his team tried to find a hospital in the capital to care for the woman. "Unfortunately at that time there was no facility that could accommodate her," he says. "So we quickly realized that we had to handle the situation ourselves."

"None of us had any Ebola experience," he says. They scoured the Internet for information about how to treat Ebola. They cleared out a building on the hospital grounds and set up an isolation ward. They grabbed a bunch of hazmat suits for dealing with chemical spills at the rubber factory and gave them to the hospital staff. The suits worked just as well for Ebola cases.


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