BAMAKO/CONAKRY (Reuters) – An angry crowd attacked an Ebola treatment centre in Guinea yesterday, accusing its staff of bringing the deadly disease to the town, Medecins Sans Frontieres said, as Mali identified its first suspected cases.
More than 90 people have already died in Guinea and Liberia in what medical charity MSF, or Doctors without Borders, has warned could turn into an unprecedented epidemic in an impoverished region with poor health services.
The outbreak in Guinea is the first time the disease, epidemics of which occur regularly in Central Africa, has appeared in the country. Infected patients initially went undiagnosed for several weeks before tests confirmed Ebola.
News of the outbreak has sent shockwaves through communities with little knowledge of the disease or how it is transmitted, and the suspected cases in Mali have added to fears that it is spreading in West Africa.
MSF spokesman Sam Taylor told a Thomson Reuters Foundation reporter that the attackers in Macenta, around 425 km (265 miles) southeast of the capital Conakry, had accused staff of bringing the disease to the town.
“We have evacuated all our staff and closed the treatment centre,” he said. “We have the full support of the local leaders and we’re working with the authorities to try and resolve this problem as quickly as possible so we can start treating people again.”
He declined to give further details of the incident, including whether any MSF staff had been hurt in the attack.
In a statement broadcast on state television late on Thursday, Mali’s government announced that three people had been placed in quarantine and samples sent off to Atlanta in the United States for tests.
“A high-speed intervention team has been created to follow the evolution of the situation on the ground,” the statement said. It added that the health of the three suspected victims was showing signs of improvement.
