A man reads a newspaper featuring a front page story on the death of Liberian official Patrick Sawyer (pictured with his wife Decontee) who died of the Ebloa virus in Lagos yesterday. Nigeria is on alert against the possible spread of Ebola after the first confirmed death from the virus in Lagos, Africa’s biggest city and the country’s financial capital.

Agencies/Monrovia

 

Liberia announced yesterday the closure of all schools across the country and the quarantine of a number of communities in a bid to halt the worst Ebola outbreak on record spreading across West Africa.

Security forces across the country have been ordered to enforce the new measures, part of a new action plan that included placing all non-essential government workers on 30-day compulsory leave.

Bodies were lying abandoned as the authorities were struggling to cope with the outbreak, local newspaper Front Page Africa reported.

Witnesses reported corpses floating in rivers and abandoned in houses, as residents were scared of touching bodies likely to be infected with the virus, while health officials were overburdened, according to the report.

Overcrowded clinics had to turn patients away, while healthcare workers were threatened by locals who believe foreigners had brought Ebola into the country, said Kendall Kauffeldt, Liberia country director of US aid agency Samaritan’s Purse.

“We can no longer safely operate,” Kauffeldt was quoted as saying.

The safety of health workers was “at great risk.”

The World Health Organisation (WHO) says the current Ebola outbreak in three countries in West Africa - Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia - is the deadliest ever.

As of July 20, WHO says 1,093 cases have been confirmed or are probable or suspected. Of them 660 people have died.

In Liberia, almost 130 people have died of Ebola.

Meanwhile, two doctors treating infected patients have died of the disease.

Sierra Leone Ebola specialist Sheik Umar Khan died on Tuesday in a clinic run by medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), in the country’s north.

On Saturday, a senior doctor in Liberia died in a treatment centre on the outskirts of the capital, Monrovia.

Health officials are concerned about the disease spreading to Nigeria, Africa’s most-populous nation, after a Liberian man died after being hospitalised with Ebola in Lagos.

Standing just a few hundred metres from the hospital, John Ejiofor pleaded for the world to help contain a spread of the virus.

“Nigeria is in a serious mess,” the 40-year-old electrical engineer said. “We lack the capacity to deal with the situation.”

Residents of Lagos, sub-Saharan Africa’s largest city with more than 20mn people, returned to work yesterday after a four-day break to mark the end of Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, a public holiday across the country, even in the majority Christian south.

It was the first workday morning in the bustling mega-city since authorities confirmed that the worst-ever Ebola epidemic had reached Nigerian soil.

Patrick Sawyer, an employee of the Liberian finance ministry, is thought to have contracted the virus from his sister before travelling to Nigeria for a regional conference.

The 40-year-old died in quarantine on Friday at a hospital next to the Obalende market, where Ejiofor sat in his car yesterday, voicing concern over Nigeria’s response to the outbreak.

“If there is an Ebola epidemic in Nigeria today, our health authorities will be too overwhelmed... The government has to work with the (WHO),” to stop the virus from spreading, he said.

Elizabeth Akinlabi, a 30-year-old schoolteacher milling around Obalende, agreed, saying that days after the Ebola death was confirmed, the government’s response remained lacklustre.

“A lot of people still do not know about the existence of the disease, not to talk of taking measures to prevent it,” she said, urging the WHO “to come to the aid of Nigeria.”  

Calls for outside help are not common in Nigeria, which has a very low foreign aid reliance thanks to massive earnings from its oil industry, which produces roughly 2mn barrels of crude per day.

But in the economic capital Lagos and other cities, people have little reason to trust the public healthcare system, especially in the face of a potential crisis.

Many public hospitals are acutely understaffed and ill-equipped. Some do not have generators, a must in a country with multiple power cuts each day. Page 12

 

 

 

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