Life after Ebola: One on one with Ashoka Mukpo
By: News Staff
Email: news@abc6.com
Twitter: @ABC6
PROVIDENCE R.I. (WLNE) – It’s been more than two and a half years since freelance journalist Ashoka Mukpo was flown out of Liberia and rushed into isolation at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
This was in the heat of the outbreak that killed more than 11,000. He spent two weeks in isolation getting a blood transfusion from a fellow American survivor before doctors would declare him Ebola free.
"I’d say that the hardest thing about going through the disease was not knowing whether I would live or die," said Mukpo.
Ashoka who is from Providence spoke with ABC 6 in London on his way back to Rhode Island after spending six months in Liberia.
"I’ve been working and traveling and getting back to some of the things I loved doing before I got sick," said Mukpo. "I think when you go through things that are traumatic and painful you have a choice really after you’re sort of moving on whether you’re going to let that hold you back and have it influence the way that you live your life or whether you’re going to kind of look at yourself not as a victim but as a survivor," said Mukpo.
The journalist was back in Liberia three months after he was cleared by doctors.
He has continued to visit the country repeatedly working for media outlets including NPR and Al Jazeera telling us shortly after being cured from the virus he felt a need to tell the world about these people and what they went through.
"The people who are feeling the most profound effects are the people who lost loved ones or the people who went through the virus themselves," said Mukpo.
There are about 10,000 known Ebola survivors. The World Health Organization putting the fatality rate at around 50 percent. Ashoka says fortunately for him there haven’t been any lasting effects.
"I’d say the first year or so there was a little bit of some joint pains and discomfort in my muscles. It definitely took a little while to move past it," said Mukpo.
Just last Month, Ebola made a return to Africa. The first case popping up in the Congo.We should mention there has been progress since the 2014 outbreak in terms of treatment, an experimental Ebola vaccine proved highly protective against the virus in a trial in Guinea.
©WLNE-TV / ABC6 2017
