Like every other volunteer who serves with Médecins Sans Frontières, Stefan Liljegren joined up to help the sick and destitute. In 15 years with the agency, he has been everywhere from Afghanistan and Kosovo through to South Sudan and East Timor, the hard and often dangerous work compensated for by the knowledge that he is saving lives. His latest mission, in Ebola-hit Liberia, offers rather less job satisfaction. As field coordinator of MSF’s new 160-bed Ebola treatment centre in the capital, Monrovia, one of his tasks is to decide which of the sick people who arrive outside the clinic’s gates should get treatment. Such is the scale of the outbreak that for every 20-30 new patients the clinic admits each day, the same number are often turned away – despite the likelihood that they will go home and infect their relatives. “This is by far the most difficult challenge that I have ever faced,” the 44-year-old Swede told The Telegraph during a brief break from his work in the sweltering humidity of Liberia’s monsoon season. “Every day I have been faced with impossible choices, and decisions that are inhuman to make.
Having to tell someone that they can’t come in when they are screaming and begging to do so is an indescribable feeling, especially when you know they may go back to families who might well then get sick themselves.” Outside the clinic an hour earlier, a grisly scene demonstrated Mr. Liljegren’s point. Resting face down in the mud was the body of Dauda Konneh, 42. He had been lying there dead since daybreak. “He was vomiting a lot and had symptoms like Ebola, so we put him in a pick-up truck and took him here for treatment,” said one young man outside…
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Overflowing treatment centers, means entire families are now becoming infected
The family of the sick man, who had endured Ebola’s telltale symptoms for six days, took him by taxi to treatment centers here in the capital twice, only to be turned back at the gate each time for lack of beds. He died at home, his arms thrashing violently and blood spewing out his mouth, in front of his sons. “We had to carry him home two times because they could do nothing for us,” said Eric Gweah, 25, as a team of body collectors came to retrieve the corpse of his father, Ofori Gweah, 62. “The only thing the government can do is come for bodies. They are killing us.” So many Ebola victims are dying at home because of the severe shortage of treatment centers here in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital that they are infecting family members, neighbors and others in a ballooning circle of contagion. Only 18 percent of Ebola patients in Liberia are being cared for in hospitals or other settings that reduce the risk of transmission by isolating them from the rest of the population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unless that rate reaches 70 percent, the center predicted this week, Ebola cases will keep soaring.
In its worst-case estimate, Liberia and Sierra Leone, two of the three West African nations hit hardest by the outbreak, could face 1.4 million infections by Jan. 20 — more than 10 percent of their combined populations of about 10.3 million. In the coming weeks, the United States military will try to overhaul the fight against Ebola in Liberia, home to 1,580 of the 2,800 Ebola deaths so far recorded in West Africa. The 3,000-strong American mission will not treat patients, but will build as many as 17 treatment centers, with a total of 1,700 beds, and try to train 500 health workers a week…
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Italy stages Ebola evacuation drills – nurses union says US not ready for cases, an outbreak would be ‘pure pandemonium’
The patient, a slight woman in her 30s, lay motionless on the stretcher as a half-dozen men in biohazard suits transferred her from a C-27J cargo plane into an ambulance and then into a mobile hospital isolation ward, never once breaking the plastic seal encasing her. The exercise put on Wednesday was just a simulation of the procedures that would be used to evacuate an Ebola patient to Italy. But for Italian military, Red Cross and health care workers, it offered essential experience, especially for those on the front lines of the country’s sea-rescue operation involving thousands of African migrants who arrive here every day in smugglers’ boats. Italian authorities and medical experts insist that the risk of Ebola spreading from Africa to Europe is small, given that the virus only spreads by direct contact with infected blood or other bodily fluids. They say Italy’s first case of Ebola will probably be an Italian doctor or missionary who contracts the disease while caring for patients in Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea — the three hardest-hit countries — and is airlifted home for treatment.
Yet concern runs high: EU health ministers who met this week in Milan spent an entire session discussing Ebola and the EU. They concluded that, while the risk of the disease coming to Europe is low, the EU must improve coordination and prevention measures to better diagnose, transport and treat suspected cases. “There is an emergency,” said Dr. Natale Ceccarelli, who heads the infirmary at the Pratica di Mare air force base south of Rome, where the training course was staged. “If one person is infected, he infects everyone.”
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Red Cross team attacked while burying bodies: “without a vaccine we may not be able to stop this epidemic,” warns virologist.
A Red Cross team was attacked while collecting bodies believed to be infected with Ebola in southeastern Guinea, the latest in a string of assaults that are hindering efforts to control West Africa’s current outbreak. One Red Cross worker is recovering after being wounded in the neck in Tuesday’s attack in Forecariah, according to Benoit Carpentier, a spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Family members of the dead initially set upon the six volunteers and vandalized their cars, said Mariam Barry, a resident. Eventually a crowd went to the regional health office, where they threw rocks at the building. The attack is the most recent in a series that have plagued teams working to bury bodies safely, provide information about Ebola and disinfect public places. The most shocking was the abduction and killing last week in Guinea of eight people, health workers educating people about Ebola and the journalists accompanying them. Ebola is believed to have infected more than 5,800 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria and Senegal. The outbreak has grown into the world’s largest ever for the disease, partially because it went undetected for months, began in a highly mobile area and has spread to densely populated West African cities. Resistance to efforts to control the disease – from outright denials that Ebola exists to fears that the very people sent to combat it are in fact carriers – has frustrated efforts to end or even slow the disease’s spread in all three of the most affected countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, say officials.
In April, Doctors Without Borders briefly pulled out its team from the Guinean town of Macenta after their clinic was stoned. In Liberia, the homes of some of the infected have been attacked. Last week, Red Cross workers were threatened in Sierra Leone, Carpentier, the Red Cross spokesman, said. The disease is so new to this part of the world and so terrifyingly lethal that many people fear all outsiders associated with Ebola, even if they are coming to help, said Meredith Stakem, a health and nutrition adviser for Catholic Relief Services…
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