A healthcare worker wearing full body suits burns infected items at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy hospital of Monrovia yesterday. Nurses at Liberia’s largest hospital went on strike on September 1, 2014, demanding better pay and equipment to protect them against a deadly Ebola epidemic which has killed hundreds in the west African nation.
Reuters/Conakry/Dakar
Guinea’s government yesterday said that Ebola had spread to a previously unaffected region of the country, as US experts warned that the worst ever outbreak of the deadly virus was spiralling out of control in west Africa.
Guinea, the first country to detect the haemorrhagic fever in March, had said it was containing the outbreak but authorities announced that nine new cases had been found in the southeastern prefecture of Kerouane.
The area, some 750km southeast of the capital Conakry, lies close to where the virus was first detected deep in Guinea’s forest region.
The epidemic has since spread to four other west African countries and killed more than 1,500 people. “There has been a new outbreak in Kerouane but we have sent in a team to contain it,” said Aboubacar Sikidi Diakite, head of Guinea’s Ebola task force. He insisted the outbreak was being contained.
The nine confirmed cases were in the town of Damaro in the Kerouane region, with a total of 18 people under observation, the health ministry said in a statement.
The latest outbreak started after the arrival of an infected person from neighbouring Liberia, the ministry said.
Guinea has recorded a total of 489 deaths and 749 Ebola cases as of September 1.
President Alpha Conde urged health personnel to step up their efforts to avoid new infections. “Even for a simple malaria, you have to protect yourselves before consulting any sick person until the end of this epidemic,” Conde said in a televised broadcast. “We had started to succeed but you dropped the ball and here we go again.”
Cases of Ebola have been reported in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal and Democratic Republic of Congo. The cases in Congo, which include 31 deaths, are a separate outbreak unrelated to the West African cases, however, the World Health Organisation has said.
In a stark analysis last week, the WHO warned that the Ebola epidemic in west Africa could infect more than 20,000 people and spread to 10 countries. It outlined a $490mn roadmap for tackling the epidemic.
Doctor Tom Kenyon, director of the US Centres for Disease Control’s (CDC) Centre for Global Health, said yesterday the outbreak was “spiralling out of control” and he warned that the window of opportunity for controlling it was closing.
“Guinea did show that with action, they brought it partially under control. But unfortunately it is back on the increase now,” he told a conference call. “It’s not under control anywhere.” He warned that the longer the outbreak went uncontained, the greater the possibility the virus could mutate, making it more difficult to contain. Ebola is only transmitted in humans by contact with the blood or bodily fluids of sick people, though suspected cases of airborne infection have been reported in monkeys in laboratories.
A senior US official rebutted a call from medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) for wealthy nations to deploy specialised biological disaster response teams to the region.