Ebola ‘overwhelming’ health services in west Africa
Zoom Dosso
BusinessInsider.com
Sep. 10, 2014
Monrovia (AFP) – Health workers reported Wednesday being overwhelmed by new Ebola cases at the epicentre of an outbreak described as an existential threat to hardest-hit Liberia.
The World Health Organization (WHO), which raised the death toll to nearly 2,300, has predicted an “exponential increase” in infection across west Africa, and warned that Liberia in particular will face thousands of new cases in the coming weeks.
“We are overwhelmed. The patients keep coming in (huge) numbers. Yesterday we received up to 30 patients,” Sophie Jane, a spokeswoman for Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, MSF), told AFP at the aid agency’s Ebola unit in Monrovia.
The WHO upped the death toll on Tuesday to 2,296 out of 4,293 cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria. Nearly half of all infections had come in the past 21 days, it said.
Liberia, with 1,200 dead, has borne the brunt of the outbreak, and has run perilously short of space at the few Ebola treatment sites operating.
The WHO said Montserrado county, which contains Monrovia, needed 1,000 beds. It reported that infected people were being driven to centres in the capital only to be turned away, return home and create “flare-ups” of deadly fever in their villages.
Bystanders watched warily on Wednesday as a man turned away by the MSF centre in Monrovia struggled to stay on his feet.
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