FREETOWN/MONROVIA, (Reuters) – The army blockaded yesterday rural areas in Sierra Leone that have been hit by the deadly Ebola virus, a senior officer said, after neighbouring Liberia declared a state of emergency to tackle the worst outbreak of the disease on record.
Worried Liberians queued at banks and stocked up on food in markets in the capital Monrovia while others took buses to unaffected parts of the West African country after President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf announced late on Wednesday the actions that will last for 90 days.
The state of emergency allows Liberia’s government to curtail civil rights and deploy troops and police to impose quarantines on badly affected communities as it tries to contain the epidemic, which has hit Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia and Nigeria. “Everyone is afraid this morning,” civil servant Cephus Togba told Reuters by telephone. “Big and small they are all panicking. Everyone is stocking up the little they have.”
With troops setting up checkpoints outside Monrovia on the way to some of the worst-hit towns, Johnson-Sirleaf said the state of emergency was necessary for “the very survival of our state and for the protection of the lives of our people”.
In Washington, D.C., a Liberian official said the country’s health care system was collapsing with hospitals closing, medical workers fleeing and people dying of common diseases because they are afraid to seek treatment.
“What is happening is the entire health sector is being devastated by the crisis. It is not only a killer, but it kills those who care for them, and a good number of them are dying,” Minister of Foreign Affairs Augustine Kpehe Ngafuan said in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation. In Geneva, World Health Organization (WHO) experts were due to hold a second day of meetings to agree on emergency measures to tackle the highly contagious virus and whether to declare an international public health emergency. Ebola has claimed at least 932 lives, according to the WHO.
After an experimental drug was administered to two U.S. charity workers who were infected in Liberia, Ebola specialists have urged the WHO to offer such drugs to Africans. The U.N. agency has asked medical ethics experts to explore this option next week.
Many in Liberia, a country founded by descendants of freed American slaves and whose capital is named after U.S. President James Monroe, are looking to the United States in this time of crisis as they did during a 1989-2003 civil war that killed nearly a quarter of a million people.
“We need help from America. We need help,” said Nancy Poure, a small trader in the suburb of Johnsonville. “This is the beginning of hardship. Ninety days of fear and suffering.”
One of the deadliest diseases known to man, Ebola kills up to 90 percent of those infected. Symptoms include internal and external bleeding, diarrhoea and vomiting. Discovered in Democratic Republic of Congo in 1976, near the Ebola river, it is believed to be carried by fruit bats, which are eaten as a delicacy in West Africa.
FEARS FOR LAGOS
Although most cases of Ebola are in the remote border area of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, alarm over the spread of the disease increased last month when a U.S. citizen died in Nigeria after traveling there by plane from Liberia.
A nurse who treated Patrick Sawyer has died in Lagos and at least five other people have been isolated with symptoms, raising fears of an outbreak in the city of 21 million people, Africa’s largest metropolis.
A hospital in the capital of Benin is treating a Nigerian man suspected of having Ebola. A sample of his blood has been sent to Senegal for testing, Health Minister Dorothee Gazard said on state television on Thursday.
