Ebola death toll unknown
Treatment centers fill up as fast as they open but many of the sick are hidden at home in West Africa.
PressHerald.com
Aug. 15, 2014
DAKAR, Senegal — The Ebola outbreak that has killed more than 1,000 people in West Africa could last another six months, Doctors Without Borders said Friday, and a medical worker acknowledged that the true death toll is unknown.
Tarnue Karbbar, who works for the aid group Plan International in northern Liberia, said response teams simply aren’t able to document all the cases erupting. Many of the sick are still being hidden at home by their relatives, too fearful of going to an Ebola treatment center.
Others are buried before the teams can get to the area, he said. In the last several days, some 75 cases have emerged in a single district.
“Our challenge now is to quarantine the area to successfully break the transmission,” he said, referring to the Voinjama area.
Many people may be hiding, but many are also finally beginning to seek treatment, as more centers open up.
Beds in such centers are filling up faster than they can be provided, evidence that the outbreak in West Africa is far more severe than the numbers show, Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for World Health Organization in Geneva, said.
There are 40 beds at a treatment center that Doctors Without Borders — known as MSF — recently took over in one quarantined county in Liberia but 137 people have flocked there, packing the hallways until they can be sorted into those who are infected and those are not, said MSF’s international president, Joanne Liu.
“It’s absolutely dangerous,” said Liu, who recently returned from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. “With the massive influx of patients that we had over the last few days, we’re not able to keep zones of patients anymore. Everybody is mixed.”
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