At the Kabala School for the Blind, in the countryside outside the northern city of Kabala, Alpha Karoma comes tapping across the dusty playground towards the shade of a mango tree. The 34-year-old was blinded by measles at the age of 11 and is now a teacher at the school, which has 87 students in its boarding house. The school, he explains, was built in 1988 by US missionaries, but during the civil war rebels raided the area and executed villagers who tried to shelter here. The building was burnt down and rebuilt. Today the blue and white concrete is streaked with bat faeces; so too, the inside of the classroom. The culprits roost in their hundreds in the rusty corrugated-steel roof. ‘They are very noisy and cause a lot of mess,’ Karoma says. Occasionally he has tried to remove the bats and been bitten with sufficient force to draw blood. He assures the Predict team, who have arrived to take samples from the bats, that it is OK to sterilise a wound by simply pouring salt on it.

Many in rural Africa prefer traditional medicines to those introduced from the West. The local attachment to bushmeat is another challenge that authorities continue to come up against. Sorie Kamara, director of the livestock and veterinary services division at Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Agriculture, describes the consumption of bushmeat as a ‘serious problem’. The country’s markets were closed during the outbreak but are now once more doing a roaring trade selling tropical game including monkeys, chimpanzees, cane rats, bats and snakes. Bushmeat is entrenched in local culture and is often a vital form of subsistence, hence why the authorities are unwilling or unable to announce an outright ban. The health risks, however, are enormous. The HIV/Aids pandemic – which to date has killed 35 million and infected 70 million – started about a century ago in Cameroon when a chimpanzee virus was transmitted to a human who almost certainly killed, butchered or consumed it. ‘I am seriously worried for the future, about the diseases lurking in the bush,’ says Kamara, sitting in his office in Freetown. ‘We are making an imbalance in the ecosystem. Ebola caught us unawares, but there may be another far worse threat out there.’