Time magazine chose doctors who fight Ebola as “Person of the Year”

Doctors, nurses and others who fight the Ebola epidemic in West Africa have been chosen as ‘Person of the Year 2014’ by the prestigious American magazine Time.

“For risking, for persisting, for sacrificing and saving” lives, said the editor Nancy Gibbs to justify the choice of the successors of Pope Francisco, named Personality of the Year in 2013.

The magazine highlights “the people in the field, the special forces of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the Christian medical-relief workers of Samaritan’s Purse and many others from all over the world,” these people who “fought side by side with local doctors and nurses, ambulance drivers and burial teams.”

The epidemic of Ebola hemorrhagic fever left 6,331 people dead among 17,800 cases of infection detected in the three most affected countries in West Africa (Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea) until December 6, according to the latest report of the World Health Organization (WHO).

In the website of the magazine, Gibbs pays tribute to the “unprecedented numbers” of doctors and nurses, who gave all their efforts while “wiping out a public-health infrastructure that was weak in the first place.”