抗击埃博拉：请看这家公司如何在利比里亚保护自己的员工

    上周在接受《财富》杂志(Fortune)长约一小时的电访专访过程中，艾德•加西亚的手机中途响起了三次。每次他都表示抱歉，然后接起电话。

    加西亚是凡士通利比里亚公司（Firestone Liberia）的总裁兼执行董事。他表示：“每通电话我都得接……每通电话都很重要。”凡士通利比里亚公司隶属美国普利司通（Bridgestone）旗下，在利比里亚拥有占地185平方英里的橡胶园，它也是利比里亚雇佣工人最多的企业。

    加亚西是菲律宾裔，算上在美国本土和利比里亚橡胶园的工作经历，他已经为公司工作32年了。目前他全面负责凡士通利比里亚公司的运营——包括橡胶林、橡胶原木和几个水力发电站，还有为员工和家属建设的120个住宅社区，以及相关学校、医院等配套设施。如果按人头算，加西亚相当于管理着一支80,000人的庞大队伍。

    自今年3月以来，埃博拉病毒(Ebola)开始在西非地区的利比里亚、几内亚和塞拉利昂等国爆发，目前已夺去了3400余条生命。加西亚的首要任务，就是在埃博拉病毒的肆虐下，保护好他的这些员工。

    “人们整天谈论的都是埃博拉。我们仍在继续抓紧业务，但是目前我们的首要任务确实是在防疫上，因为我们在这儿有好几万人需要保护。”

    直到最近，情况才演变成这个样子。

    今年3月，埃博拉病毒在几内亚爆发，然后迅速蔓延到临近的塞拉利昂和利比里亚。

    凡士通公司从1926年起就开始运营这片橡胶园。６个月前，这里也遭到了埃博拉的袭击。3月30日深夜，园区的医疗主任给加西亚打来电话，报告了该社区感染埃博拉病毒的第一起案例。患病者是凡士通公司一名员工的妻子，她早先曾去过与几内亚和塞拉利昂接壤的洛法地区，照顾她染上了埃博拉病毒的姐姐，结果自己也被传染了。

    正是这通电话，让公司的管理层开始恶补一堂如何抗击埃博拉的防疫课。

    加西亚称：“这基本上就好比一边开飞机，一边翻操作手册。星期一早上，我们听说有人感染了埃博拉，星期二早上，我们就开始给医务人员做培训。”该公司的全部150名医务人员都接受了培训，但一开始只有6人志愿加入第一支埃博拉治疗团队。

    在治疗的头几天，最大的难题是应该把这名患者安置在什么地方。因为一旦她开始表现出疫情症状，她就可能通过体液将病毒传染给下一个受害者。她也不能在医院里住院，因为那里没有隔离区。最后医护人员将这名女患者转移到医院的门诊部，因为这里与医院主要区域是隔离的。加西亚回忆道：“等她转移到我们那里时，她的病情已经很重了。”几天后她就去世了。

    接下来的10天里，凡士通公司的医务人员继续将该院的门诊部改造成一座埃博拉病毒的治疗场所，使它达到了美国疾病控制中心的标准。它只有一个入口和一个出口。该公司甚至为这座楼单独挖了一个污水处理池，然后请宗教领袖和该公司的广播电台“凡士通之声”(The Voice of Firestone)来教育大家如何抗击埃博拉。

    凡士通管理层也在准备着应对埃博拉病例的大规模增长，但幸运的是，园区里再没有人感染埃博拉——至少在短期内没有。

    医务人员对可能与那名女患者接触过的人进行了密切监控，她的直系家庭成员更是被隔离了21天，但是他们都没有感染。

    加西亚表示：“经过将近４个月，我们终于摆脱了埃博拉。”

    In an hour-long phone interview with Fortune last week, Ed Garcia’s cell phone rang in the background with a cheerful jingle on three separate occasions. Each time, he excused himself to pick it up.

    “I have to answer every call…. Every call is important,” said Garcia, the president and managing director of Firestone Liberia, a 185 square mile rubber plantation operated by Bridgestone Americas, the largest employer in the West African nation.

    Originally from the Philippines, Garcia has worked for Firestone Liberia—either on the plantation itself or from the United States—for 32 years. He currently oversees the entire Firestone Liberia operation—its rubber farms and rubber wood and hydroelectric power plants, along with 120 housing communities with schools and medical clinics for the companies’ employees and their dependents. All told, Garcia is responsible for 80,000 people.

    And since March, he’s been in charge of protecting those residents from an Ebola epidemic that has spread through the West African nations of Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone and has claimed some 3,400 lives.

    “It’s Ebola, Ebola, Ebola—it’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” Garcia says. “We continue to stay on top of the business and operations, but our priority really is focused on Ebola simply because of the thousands of people that we have to protect here.”

    It’s become this way only recently.

    The ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa started in Guinea in March and quickly spread to neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia.

    The epidemic hit the plantation that Firestone has operated since 1926 six months ago. In a midnight phone call from the concession’s medical director on March 30, Garcia learned that the community had its first case of Ebola. The wife of a Firestone employee had traveled to Lofa—the northernmost county of Liberia, which shares a border with both Guinea and Sierra Leone—to care for her sister who had Ebola and ended up contracting the virus herself.

    The phone call triggered what would become a crash course for Firestone Liberia management in how to deal with the disease.

    “It was basically like flying an airplane and reading the manual at the same time,” says Garcia. “That Monday morning, we started learning about Ebola. We scheduled a training for medical personnel to start on Tuesday morning,” Garcia says. All 150 of the company’s health workers received training, though only six staff members initially volunteered for the first Ebola treatment team.

    The biggest challenge of those first few days was figuring out where to put the Ebola patient, who was contagious via bodily fluids once she started showing symptoms. She couldn’t be admitted to the main hospital because it had no isolation units. The medical staff ended up moving the woman to the hospital’s outpatient facility, which is separate from the main hospital. “By the time she reached our place,” Garcia says, “she was far too advanced.” She died there a day later.

    Over the next 10 days, Firestone’s medical staff continued to convert the hospital’s outpatient building into an Ebola treatment facility, retrofitting it to the standards set by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with one entrance and one exit. The company even dug a new septic tank for the facility, and it relied on religious leaders and its radio station, The Voice of Firestone, to launch Ebola education programs.

    Firestone management was preparing for an onslaught of additional cases, but they never came—not for a while, at least.

    The medical staff monitored individuals who may have come in contact with the first Firestone Ebola victim—her immediate family was quarantined for 21 days—but none of them contracted the disease.

    “For almost four months after that,” Garcia says, “we were Ebola-free.”