Category: Health

{{Security forces in Liberia’s capital have deployed to enforce a quarantine in a large slum area in Monrovia in order to contain the spread of Ebola.}}

The isolation of West Point and a countrywide night-time curfew are the latest anti-Ebola measures to be ordered by the president.

Since the beginning of the year, more than 1,200 people have died of the virus in four West African countries.

In Nigeria, a top Lagos doctor has just died of the virus.

That brings the number of people who have died of Ebola in Nigeria to five, the health ministry said.

Colleagues said consultant Stella Ameyo Adadevo was the first medic to order that a sick patient from Liberia be tested for Ebola when he was admitted in July.

“We owe her a lot; she managed the situation like a thorough professional that she was. She had helped Nigeria to contain the epidemic in her own way,” Akin Osibogun, the chief medical director at Lagos University Teaching Hospital, told Nigeria’s Premium Times newspaper.

Officials says five people have recovered from the virus in Nigeria and have been discharged from hospital in Lagos. Two are still being treated.

Since the outbreak spread to Nigeria in July, several airlines have stopped flights to the region.

wirestory

{{The outbreak of Ebola in West Africa will take at least six months to bring under control, medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) says.
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Speaking in Geneva, MSF President Joanne Liu said the situation was “deteriorating faster, and moving faster, than we can respond to”.

Earlier, the World Health Organization (WHO) said the scale of the outbreak appeared to be “vastly underestimated”.

It said that “extraordinary measures” were needed.

The epidemic began in Guinea in February and has since spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria.

On Friday, the death toll rose to 1,145 after WHO said 76 new deaths had been reported in the two days to 13 August. There have been 2,127 cases reported.

Ms Liu said that although Guinea was the initial epicentre, the pace there had slowed, and other countries – particularly Liberia – were now the focus.

“If we don’t stabilise Liberia, we will never stabilise the region,” she said.

“In terms of timeline, we’re not talking in terms of weeks, we’re talking in terms of months. We need a commitment for months, at least I would say six months, and I’m being, I would say, very optimistic.”

Ms Liu also called for more action from the international community and stronger leadership from WHO – the UN’s health agency.

“All governments must act. It must be done now if we want to contain this epidemic,” she said.

Ebola is transmitted by direct contact with the body fluids of a person who is infected.

Initial flu-like symptoms can lead to external haemorrhaging from areas such as eyes and gums, and internal bleeding which can lead to organ failure.

The WHO – which declared a global health emergency last week – recently said the risk of transmission of Ebola during air travel remained low, as the disease is not airborne.

As a consequence, Kenya Airways has rejected pressure to suspend its flights to the Ebola-hit states of West Africa.

BBC

{{The army blockaded on Thursday rural areas in Sierra Leone that have been hit by the deadly Ebola virus, a senior officer said, after neighbouring Liberia declared a state of emergency to tackle the worst outbreak of the disease on record.}}

Worried Liberians queued at banks and stocked up on food in markets in the capital Monrovia while others took buses to unaffected parts of the West African country after President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf announced late on Wednesday the actions that will last for 90 days.

The state of emergency allows Liberia’s government to curtail civil rights and deploy troops and police to impose quarantines on badly affected communities as it tries to contain the epidemic, which has hit Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia and Nigeria.

“Everyone is afraid this morning,” civil servant Cephus Togba told Reporters. “Big and small they are all panicking. Everyone is stocking up the little they have.”

With troops setting up checkpoints outside Monrovia on the way to some of the worst-hit towns, Johnson-Sirleaf said the state of emergency was necessary for “the very survival of our state and for the protection of the lives of our people”.

In Washington, D.C., a Liberian official said the country’s health care system was collapsing with hospitals closing, medical workers fleeing and people dying of common diseases because they are afraid to seek treatment.

“What is happening is the entire health sector is being devastated by the crisis. It is not only a killer, but it kills those who care for them, and a good number of them are dying,” Minister of Foreign Affairs Augustine Kpehe Ngafuan said in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In Geneva, World Health Organization (WHO) experts were due to hold a second day of meetings to agree on emergency measures to tackle the highly contagious virus and whether to declare an international public health emergency.