February 2019 Hero of the Month: Richard Sacra, M.D.
My October, 2016, Hero of the Month was Dr. Paul Allen Cox; this month it is Dr. Richard Sacra.
Dr. Sacra is one of hundreds of doctors from the United States and Europe, who along with their colleagues, tend to those suffering in Africa and daily risk their lives in doing so. They do so without any meaningful recognition because they believe in their mission. Thankfully, Dr. Sacra survived being infected with Ebola while treating Ebola patients.
A true testament to
his courage and commitment is that as soon as he was well, he returned
to Liberia to continue his work. The Ebola epidemics have proven that
the only way to save Western Civilization from a pandemic is to try to
contain it at its source before it spreads. Therefore, we honor Dr.
Sacra and his colleagues not only for saving the innocent victims of
Ebola in Africa but also for saving us from the horrors of a global
pandemic. The article below, created and distributed by the Associated
Press and published in the San Diego Union Tribune, details his heroic
service:
US Doctor Who Survived Ebola Honored for Service in Liberia © 2019 Associated Press by PHILIP MARCELO published in The San Diego Union Tribune, February 3, 2019
Almost five years have passed since he nearly died of Ebola in Liberia,
but Richard Sacra has never wavered from his commitment to the
struggling West African nation.
The 56-year-old family doctor from Massachusetts was among a handful of Americans treated and cured of Ebola during West Africa’s deadly epidemic in 2014, which was the worst ever outbreak of the virus, claiming more than 11,000 lives over two years, primarily in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
Sacra contracted the virus while delivering babies at ELWA, a missionary hospital in the Liberian capital of Monrovia where he’s worked for more than two decades. He was evacuated and treated in Omaha, Nebraska, but within months, Sacra was back at ELWA — which stands for “Eternal Love Winning Africa” — treating patients.
The devout Christian, who says he dreamed of becoming a missionary since he was a child, hasn’t stopped going back since.
“It’s our adopted home,” Sacra said Wednesday as he and his wife Debbie took a rare break at their home outside Worcester, Massachusetts, where he’s on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. “My wife and I have been going to Liberia since 1987. Our kids grew up there. So the idea of not going would be harder for me than the idea of going back.”
Sacra was honored Thursday by the African Mission Healthcare Foundation for his work in Liberia, a nation founded as a colony of freed African American slaves in the 19th century.
The organization awarded him the L’Chaim Prize for Outstanding Christian Medical Missionary Service at a ceremony in New York City. The annual prize comes with a $500,000 gift.
Sacra said the money
will be used at ELWA to build an intensive care unit, install solar
panels and build out a training program for family physicians that he
founded in 2017. The 107-bed hospital was founded in 1965 and is run by
SIM, an evangelical Christian organization based in North Carolina.
In this Jan. 30, 2019 photo, Dr. Rick Sacra poses at his home in
Holden, Mass.
Sacra, a Massachusetts missionary doctor who was among a handful of
Americans treated and cured of Ebola in 2014, is being honored for his
work in Liberia through the deadly epidemic.
(ELISE AMENDOLA, AP PHOTO)
Increasing the ranks of family doctors is a small but critical piece in rebuilding the nation, which had never fully recovered from more than a decade of civil war before Ebola struck, Sacra said.
“One of the things the Ebola crisis really highlighted was how weak the health system in Liberia was. The whole system just collapsed because there were too few trained doctors and nurses,” he said. “So one of our goals as a mission is to strengthen that health system. To not just bring over doctors, but to train local physicians and build up their capacity so that something like this won’t happen again.”
Ebola has continued to flare up in other parts of Africa, particularly the Congo, where more than 300 have died since last summer. But Sacra believes Liberia is better prepared than it was five years ago.
More doctors are graduating from local medical programs, the national government has established a public health monitoring and education system, and an experimental Ebola vaccine is being tested.
“Building a health system from scratch is not something you can do in a year or two,” Sacra said. “It’s a generation long project.”
With their three sons now in their 20s and beginning their own careers, Sacra says he and his wife are committed to being a part of those efforts for the foreseeable future.
“We’re just grateful God gave us a second chance to continue to make an impact,” he said. (© 2019, The Associated Press)