Ebola Rages in Sierra Leone as UN Misses Targets
By Simeon Bennett and Makiko Kitamura
Bloomberg.com
Dec 1, 2014
The United Nations has probably missed targets it set for curbing West Africa’s Ebola epidemic, as new treatment centers are being built in Sierra Leone to cope with a surge in infections in that country.
Only 23 percent of cases are being isolated in Liberia, and 40 percent in Sierra Leone, short of a goal set in October to isolate seven-in-ten cases by today. Neither country has enough burial teams to achieve a target of safely burying 70 percent of Ebola-related deaths, according to the World Health Organization. Still, unreliable data make it difficult to know conclusively whether the goals have been met, the Geneva-based WHO said.
While new infections are declining in Liberia and stable in Guinea, they’re rising in Sierra Leone, particularly in the country’s north and west, including the capital Freetown, according to the WHO. Burial rites in which mourners touch corpses of the dead are continuing to contribute to the spread of Ebola in Sierra Leone, Alpha Kanu, the nation’s information minister, said last week.
“Getting your people who for centuries have been steeped in those cultural practices to abandon those practices overnight is one of the challenges we have been facing,” Kanu said. “The culture of continuing with traditional practices is still very much a challenge. It’s a very touchy-feely African culture.”
Eclipsing Liberia
The Rest…HERE
