With Aid Doctors Gone, Ebola Fight Grows Harder…(Oh Great…)
By SHERI FINK
NYTimes.com
AUG. 16, 2014
When people started dying of Ebola in Liberia, Clarine Vaughn faced a wrenching choice: Should she send home, for their own health and safety, four American doctors working for Heartt, the aid group she led there? Or should she keep them in the country without proper supplies or training to fight the virulent, contagious disease, which was already spreading panic?
After much agonizing, Ms. Vaughn, who lives in Liberia, pulled the doctors out and canceled plans to bring in more. The African physicians and nurses left behind told her they understood, but felt abandoned. They said, “We need you guys here,” she recalled.
Since then, Ms. Vaughn has wondered if the American doctors might have made a difference, and she asked the aid group AmeriCares to help. It sent in a planeload of supplies that landed in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, last Sunday.
3 Liberian Health Workers With Ebola Receive Scarce Drug After Appeals to U.S.AUG. 16, 2014
The departure of many Western development workers from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the West African countries hit hardest by Ebola, has further weakened the region’s decrepit, understaffed health systems at the very moment they are facing one of the most volatile public health crises ever. Liberia, population four million, has fewer than 250 doctors left in the entire country, according to the Liberia Medical and Dental Council. Seven doctors there have contracted Ebola, and two of them have died.
The Rest…HERE
