Medical staff members of the Croix Rouge NGO put on protective suits yesterday before collecting the corpse of an Ebola victim in Monrovia.
AFP/Monrovia
Jean-Pierre Veyrenche, in charge of building Ebola treatment centres in Monrovia for the World Health Organisation (WHO), says that fear is keeping international aid experts from joining the battle against the west African outbreak.
“No one knows what to do” to handle the wildfire spread of Ebola in Liberia’s densely populated capital, Veyrenche told AFP in an interview, stressing that humanitarian workers were all “learning” as they go along.
But he said that with “simple measures”, medical staff could protect themselves and “get work done” – and that Liberia, like its Ebola-struck neighbours, remained in dire need of trained international workers.
Of the four west African nations affected by the Ebola outbreak, Liberia has been hit the hardest, with 3,458 people infected – more than half of the total number of cases.
Of those, 1,830 have died, according to a WHO count released on Saturday.
“The situation is out of control since the epidemic continues to grow... Here we have a country emerging completely broken from a civil war. There are only a few dozen Liberian doctors left. The need is glaring – especially for healthcare personnel. And the need isn’t being met with the arrival of foreign aid workers, who don’t know how to manage such a huge epidemic in an urban environment,” Veyrenche said.
He said he was not optimistic about the immediate future.
“We’re facing a lack of outside support, and a broken-down state trying to do what it can with what it has – which is not much. For me there’s no doubt the number of cases will explode in the upcoming weeks and months.”
Veyrenche added: The rainy season is on its way, and the mosquitos will be coming out. Then we’ll see an explosion in the number of cases of malaria. This is not going to be easy: there’s a risk of mixing up malaria and Ebola, since the symptoms are similar.”
“What’s even worse, what’s missing is hard data – like the true number of (Ebola) cases. The figures being released are just for the cases that have been officially counted. I believe many people are just burying their dead at home, in their gardens.”
Veyrenche is in charge of the construction of Ebola clinics, which he explained entailed “setting up 500 beds”.
“I think I’ll be done in a month. There are a lot of technical issues to consider – how a plot of land is laid out, how big and how accessible it is.”
