Fatu Kekula is a Liberian woman who was a nursing student during the Ebola virus epidemic in Liberia.
The trash bag method has been recognized as a relatively simple and accessible way for people to protect themselves in an epidemic if they cannot get treatment in a hospital.
[2] Kekula did not have access to standard personal protective equipment from the highly-contagious disease, so to care for her sick family members, she improvised a new method.
She was accepted into the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
And what a great opportunity for our current students to be able to study alongside someone who has faced a crisis that threatened her country, her own family and herself?
"[4] She was particularly interested in learning more about caring for burn injuries, as Liberian children sometimes fall into the open fires used for cooking.
[3] Workers from international aid organizations learned about Kekula's "trash bag method" and began teaching it to other people in West Africa who did not have the means or ability to make it to a hospital.