Tag: Ebola

Hiding Ebola patients a misdeed warns president

Liberia’s president warned Monday that anyone caught hiding suspected Ebola patients will be prosecuted.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s comments on Monday dispelled rumors in Liberia that the outbreak isn’t real.

Her warning came just days after Sierra Leone issued a similar warning, saying some patients had discharged themselves from the hospital and had gone into hiding.

Sirleaf expressed concern that some patients had been kept in homes and churches instead of receiving medical attention.

“Let this warning go out: Anyone found or reported to be holding suspected Ebola cases in homes or prayer houses can be prosecuted under the law of Liberia,” Sirleaf said.

Kenema, on the frontline of Sierra Leone’s fight against Ebola, is located in the diamond-rich east. It is the West African nation’s third largest city.

Health workers have encountered resistance throughout the region ever since Ebola cases were first confirmed in March, and some have even been attacked.

At the Moala checkpoint on the road to Liberia, masked health workers take the temperature of all travelers to monitor for anyone who might be carrying a fever.

But many still put faith in traditional methods.

At the same Moala checkpoint, police and soldiers tied herbal rope bracelets around travellers’ wrists, telling them a local traditional healer had been told in a dream that doing so could ward off Ebola.

The outbreak of the disease in West Africa is already the deadliest on record, with 635 cases and 367 fatalities, according to the latest World Health Organization numbers. A majority of the deaths — 280 — have been in Guinea where cases were first reported.

In an update released Monday, Liberia’s health ministry said the country had recorded 49 deaths as a result of Ebola, 26 of which were confirmed by laboratory tests.

There is no cure for the deadly disease which has an incubation period of two to 21 days and starts with fever and fatigue before descending into headaches, vomiting, violent diarrhea and then multiple organ failure and massive internal bleeding.

The deadly Ebola virus could solve France’s immigration problems “in three months”, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder and honorary president of France’s far-Right Front National, has said.

Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) says Ebola is “out of control”, located in at least 60 places across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

 

MSF: Ebola totally out of control

The Ebola outbreak ravaging West Africa is “totally out of control,” according to a senior official for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), who says the medical group is stretched to the limit in responding.

The outbreak has caused more deaths than any other of the disease, said another official with the medical charity. Ebola has been linked to more than 330 deaths in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, according to the World Health Organization.

International organizations and the governments involved need to send in more health experts and increase public education messages about how to stop the spread of the disease, Bart Janssens, the director of operations for the medical group in Brussels, told The Associated Press on Friday.

“The reality is clear that the epidemic is now in a second wave,” Janssens said. “And, for me, it is totally out of control.”

The Ebola virus, which causes internal bleeding and organ failure, spreads through direct contact with infected people. There is no cure or vaccine, so containing an outbreak focuses on supportive care for the ill and isolating them to limit the spread of the virus.

The current outbreak, which began in Guinea either late last year or early this year, had appeared to slow before picking up pace again in recent weeks, including spreading to the Liberian capital for the first time.

“This is the highest outbreak on record and has the highest number of deaths, so this is unprecedented so far,” said Armand Sprecher, a public health specialist with Doctors Without Borders.

According to the WHO, the highest previous death toll was in the first recorded Ebola outbreak in Congo in 1976, when 280 deaths were reported. Because Ebola often touches remote areas and the first cases sometimes go unrecognized, it is likely that there are deaths that go uncounted during outbreaks.

The multiple locations of the current outbreak and its movement across borders make it one of the “most challenging Ebola outbreaks ever,” Fadela Chaib, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization, said earlier in the week.

But Janssens’ description of the Ebola outbreak was even more alarming, and he warned that the countries involved had not recognized the gravity of the situation. He criticized WHO for not doing enough to prod local leaders; the U.N. health agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“There needs to be a real political commitment that this is a very big emergency,” he said. “Otherwise, it will continue to spread, and for sure it will spread to more countries.”

But Tolbert Nyenswah, Liberia’s deputy minister of health, said the highest levels of government are working to contain the outbreak, noting that Liberia had a long period with no new cases before this second wave.

Source: Breitbart.com

Ebola death toll hits 337

The death toll in west Africa’s three-nation Ebola outbreak has risen to 337, the World Health Organization said Wednesday, making it the deadliest ever outbreak of the haemorrhagic fever.

The new toll marks a more than 60-percent hike since the WHO’s last figure on June 4, when it said 208 people had succumbed to the deadly virus.

Including the deaths, 528 people across the three countries have contracted Ebola, one of the deadliest viruses known to man, the WHO said.

A majority of cases, 398 of them, have surfaced in Guinea, where west Africa’s first ever Ebola outbreak began in January.

Sierra Leone has registered 97 cases in total, while Liberia has seen 33.

That outbreak, until now the deadliest, killed 280 people, according to WHO figures.

Source: Yahoo