Girls read a poster distributed by Unicef bearing information and illustrations of best practices that help prevent the spread of Ebola, in the Liberia city of Voinjama.
Reuters/Freetown/Monrovia
Hundreds of troops deployed in Sierra Leone and Liberia yesterday to fight the worst outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus, as the death toll climbed to 887 and three new suspected cases of the highly contagious disease were reported in Nigeria.
With healthcare systems in the West Africa nations completely overrun by the epidemic, the African Development Bank said yesterday that it would immediately disburse $50mn to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea – the countries worst affected – as part of an international effort to contain it.
The World Health Organisation (WHO), which warned last week of catastrophic consequences if the disease were not controlled, reported 61 new deaths in the two days to August 1.
The outbreak began in February in the forests of Guinea, where the toll continues to rise, but its epicentre has since shifted to neighbouring Liberia and Sierra Leone.
In Nigeria, where US citizen Patrick Sawyer died of Ebola in late July after arriving from Liberia, the WHO reported three new cases, two of them probable and one suspected.
Nigerian authorities had said earlier yesterday that a doctor who treated Sawyer had contracted the disease, but a health ministry official declined to comment on the discrepancy.
Panic among local communities, which have attacked health workers and threatened to burn down isolation wards, prompted Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea to impose tough measures last week, including the closure of schools and the quarantine of the remote forest region hardest hit by the disease.
Long convoys of military trucks ferried soldiers and medical workers yesterday to Sierra Leone’s far east, where the density of Ebola cases is highest.
Military spokesman Colonel Michael Samoura said the operation, code-named Octopus, involved around 750 military personnel.
Troops will gather in the southeastern town of Bo before travelling to isolated communities to implement quarantines, he added.
Healthcare workers will be allowed to come and go freely, and the communities will be kept supplied with food.
In neighbouring Liberia, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and ministers held a crisis meeting on Sunday to discuss a series of anti-Ebola measures as police contained infected communities in the northern Lofa county.
Police were setting up checkpoints and roadblocks for key entrance and exit points to those infected communities, with nobody allowed to leave quarantined communities.
Troops were fanning out across Liberia to help deal with the emergency.
“The situation will probably get worse before it gets better,” Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown told Reuters. “We are over-stretched. We need support; we need resources; we need workers.”
WHO chief Margaret Chan warned regional leaders on Friday that Ebola was outpacing their efforts to contain it and pledged to organise a $100mn international response to bring the outbreak under control.
US officials and multilateral agencies were due to discuss the emergency at a three-day US-Africa summit in Washington.
A Reuters witness in the Liberian capital Monrovia said several clinics were spontaneously closing their doors as doctors were too afraid to treat patients.
More than 60 doctors have already died of Ebola, hampering efforts to control the outbreak.
Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which normally spearheads the fight against Ebola, has only a small team in Liberia and says it does not have the capacity to increase it.
Health workers say they are overwhelmed by the number of cases, a scenario exacerbated by the departure of some international staff following the infection of two US staff of the Samaritan’s Purse charity in Liberia.
One of them, Kent Brantly, was improving on Sunday after being flown back to the United States for treatment.
The second staff member, Nancy Writebol, was expected to arrive back in the United States by midday today, according to Samaritan’s Purse.
The normally bustling streets of Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown were eerily quiet yesterday after President Ernest Bai Koromo called on residents to stay home and pray, a Reuters reporter said (*see accompanying report).
Ambulances and police vehicles lined the streets, while radio stations played interviews with health ministry officials and a musical jingle informing the local population of symptoms.
Highly contagious, the deadliest strain of the Ebola virus can kill up to 90% of those infected, though in the current outbreak the rate is running around 55%.
Symptoms initially include muscle pains and joint aches, though they worsen to vomiting, diarrhoea and internal and external bleeding in the final stages.
Officials seeking to bury Ebola victims faced protests at a burial site in a suburb of Monrovia this weekend and about 25 soldiers were called in to guard the site.
Protests erupt in Liberia as bodies pile up
Liberians blocked major roads across the capital of the Ebola-hit west African nation yesterday to protest against dead bodies being left for days in houses and abandoned in the streets.
The impoverished country, along with neighbouring Guinea and Sierra Leone, is struggling to contain an epidemic that has infected 1,440 people and left nearly 900 dead across the region since the start of the year.
“No cars are allowed to pass on this road until the government can come and get the bodies that have been lying in the houses for four days now,” protester Kamara Fofana, 56, told AFP in the western Monrovia suburb of Douala.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf announced last week the closure of schools and placement of “non-essential” government workers on 30 days’ leave in a bid to halt the epidemic, which has killed 227 people in Liberia.
Ministers have warned against touching the dead or anyone ill with Ebola-like symptoms, which include fever, vomiting, severe headaches and muscular pain and, in the final stages, profuse bleeding.
“Four people died in this community. Because the government says that we should not touch bodies, no one has gone to bury them. We have been calling the ministry of health hotline to no avail,” Fofana added.
Liberians have been advised to call the emergency number to ask for the removal of the dead while soldiers on the streets are keeping areas clear of corpses.
But many have complained that overstretched health workers have been leaving bodies in the streets and in homes for days.
“Our mother was vomiting. We tried to call the ministry of health but we did not see anyone,” Miatta Myers, who lives in central Monrovia, told AFP. “For five days now her body has been in the house. The only way we can get the attention of the government is to block the road. This is what we are doing.”
Road blocks first sprung up across major routes over the weekend, and have appeared in several neighbourhoods of Monrovia, according to an AFP reporter in the capital.
Deputy health minister Tolbert Nyensuah said the government was doing its best to collect bodies as quickly as possible.
“We buried 30 people during the weekend in a mass grave outside the city. The government has purchased land from a private citizen and that land will be used to bury bodies,” he said.
