Guinea woman pays price for Ebola rumour

Johannesburg, South Africa - It was going to be a nice way to welcome her new baby into the world - alongside her South African family, whom she had last seen 16 years ago.

But the young Guinean mother's dreams were quickly shattered when staff at a local maternity hospital in Johannesburg leaked inaccurate information that she had contracted Ebola. Doctors and nurses refused to touch her or feed her and kept her in isolation even after she was tested negative.

During her entire childbirth experience, she had none of her loved ones around her as she had planned.

The woman agreed to recount, for the first time to Al Jazeera, her bittersweet tale of a reunion marred by unprofessional healthcare workers.

She has asked not be named for her safety and that of her husband and three other children, who still need to travel back to Guinea once she has recovered from her childbirth.

"The worst part is that after everything no one from the hospital has come to me and apologized for the incorrect information going out about me prematurely," said the woman, as she cradled her tiny newborn girl, wrapped in layers of blankets to shield her from the cold weather that has hit the city.

"I knew I did not have Ebola. I did not even have the symptoms," she told Al Jazeera.

Within one day of the woman's admission to the Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital in South Africa's most populous city last week, news spread that a pregnant Guinean woman at the hospital was South Africa's first suspected Ebola case.