Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf imposed a
nighttime curfew from Wednesday and
quarantined two affected neighbourhoods in a bid
to stem the Ebola epidemic rampaging through
West Africa. “Commencing Wednesday, August 20 there will be
a curfew from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am (2100 to 0600
GMT),” Sirleaf said in a radio address late Tuesday. “All entertainment centres are to be closed. All
video centres are to be closed at 6:00 pm,” she
ordered. The new quarantine areas include Monrovia’s West
Point slum. Earlier, Liberia’s Information Minister Lewis Brown
announced the return of 17 missing Ebola patients,
who had fled a medical facility in West Point on
Saturday after it was attacked by club-wielding
youths. Their disappearance had raised fears of a
nightmare scenario of people with the highly
contagious disease wandering the city, where
unburied corpses have lain abandoned in the
streets. In Nigeria, meanwhile, a senior doctor who treated
the country’s first Ebola patient has died, taking the
death toll in Africa’s most populous country to five,
health minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said on
Tuesday. Chukwu said Liberian-American Patrick Sawyer, 40,
was “the most senior who participated in the
management of the (first Ebola) patient” in the
country. The World Health Organization said the tropical
virus had killed 84 people in just three days, a
surge that has pushed the overall death toll from
the West African outbreak to 1,229. - Liberia suffering biggest death toll - Liberia has suffered the biggest toll, 466 deaths
from 834 diagnosed cases. Guinea has recorded 543 cases and 394 deaths,
Sierra Leone 848 cases and 365 deaths. But, in a glimmer of hope, Brown said three doctors
in Liberia who had been given the experimental US-
made drug ZMapp were responding to the
treatment. The UN’s new pointman on Ebola, David Nabarro,
will travel to West Africa Wednesday hoping to
shore up health services in the four countries hit by
the worst-ever outbreak of the virus. The British physician will fly to Dakar late
Wednesday before heading to Monrovia, Freetown,
Conakry and Abuja, accompanied by Keiji Fukuda
from the World Health Organisation. Nabarro said he would focus on “revitalizing the
health sectors” in the West African countries, many
of which have only recently emerged from many
years of devastating conflict. The spreading virus is overwhelming inadequate
public health services already battling common
deadly diseases such as malaria. Efforts to contain the epidemic have also run up
against local distrust of outside doctors, and stories
of aid workers carrying the infection. Such fears have often led to violence, with the raid
on the medical facility in Monrovia’s West Point slum
on Saturday the most dramatic example. Wild rumours of cannibalism and people being
drained of their blood in Ebola clinics have fuelled
panic, with health workers saying the testimony of
survivors was crucial to proving myths wrong. President Sirleaf warned that local rituals were
among the factors spreading the disease. “We have been unable to control the spread due to
continued denials, cultural burying practices,
disregard for the advice of health workers and
disrespect for the warnings by the government,”
she bemoaned. - ‘Encouraging signs’ - WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib noted
“encouraging signs” in Nigeria and Guinea, where
prevention measures and work to trace lines of
infection were starting to take effect. The Nigerian outbreak has been traced to a sole
foreigner, a Liberian-American who died in late July
in Lagos. All subsequent Nigerian victims have had
direct contact with him. No cure or vaccine is currently available for the
disease, which is spread by close contact with body
fluids, meaning patients must be isolated. Given the extent of the crisis, the WHO has
authorised largely untested treatments — including
ZMapp and the Canadian-made VSV-EBOV vaccine,
whose possible side effects on humans are not
known. Quarantine cordons now limit travel to some of the
most infected areas such as Gueckedou in Guinea,
Kenema and Kailahun in Sierra Leone and Foya in
Liberia. But with supplies cut, many of the one million
people living in the zones are struggling to feed
themselves, Chaib said, and the World Food
Programme was now stepping in. Countries throughout Africa and beyond are on
high alert, with the Equatorial Guinea airline, Ceiba
Intercontinental, the latest to suspend flights to the
whole region. Only three international airlines are still flying to
Sierra Leone — Royal Air Maroc, Brussels Airlines
and Air France. Some Air France flight crews are refusing to board
planes bound for Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria
over fears of the Ebola outbreak, the airline said
Tuesday. On Tuesday, medical authorities in Spain said a man
with fever who had returned from Sierra Leone had
been placed in an isolation ward. German experts said that a sick 30-year-old
woman of West African origin who sparked an
Ebola scare in Berlin was likely to be suffering from
a gastrointestinal infection.





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