As Ebola stalks West Africa, medics fight mistrust, hostility

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As Ebola stalks West Africa, medics fight mistrust, hostility
http://uk.reuters.com/article/...

By Saliou Samb and Adam Bailes
CONAKRY Guinea/KENEMA Sierra Leone Sun Jul 13, 2014 4:36pm BST
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(Reuters) - Governments and health agencies trying to contain the world's deadliest ever Ebola epidemic in West Africa fear the contagion could be worse than reported because suspicious locals are chasing away health workers and shunning treatment.

From Guinea, where the four-month-old outbreak claimed the first of more than 500 lives, to Sierra Leone, scores of patients are hiding away, believing hospitalization is a "death sentence".

In Guinea's southeastern Forest Region some terrified villagers are shutting off their communities to medical workers, even blocking roads and downing bridges.

Over the border in Liberia's Lofa County, health workers trying to screen two communities for the deadly disease were chased off by locals armed with cutlasses, knives, and stones, according to an internal U.N. report seen by Reuters.

In eastern Sierra Leone, police had to fire tear gas to stop relatives trying to recover bodies of Ebola victims for family burial - a serious contagion risk - amid popular suspicions the cadavers might be used for experiments or macabre rituals.

"We are seeing a lot of mistrust, intimidation and hostility from part of the population," Marc Poncin, emergency coordinator for medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Guinea, told Reuters.

The MSF treatment center at Gueckedou, 650 kilometers (400 miles) southeast of Conakry, was monitoring only one suspected case. Two weeks ago it had been treating around 25 Ebola patients.

But this was not, Poncin warned, because the disease was waning, but because he believed "dozens" of suspected cases were hiding out from medical teams in the surrounding forest region.

"What we are now seeing are villages closing themselves off, not allowing us to enter, sick people hidden in the community. They don't come and seek healthcare any more," he said.

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But Poncin said people in Gueckedou were now shunning the center there, where only 2 in 10 infected patients survived the disease.

"People see people arrive more or less OK and then they die there. So they start to mistrust the treatment center," he said.

 

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Re: As Ebola stalks West Africa, medics fight mistrust, hostility

West Africa: Defying the Ebola Odds in Sierra Leone
By Mohamed Fofanah, 12 July 2014

http://allafrica.com/stories/201407130001.html

Kenema — Adikali Kamara is a 36-year-old student nurse working in the government hospital in Kenema, a sprawling town on the fringe of the Sierra Leone's Gola tropical rain forest.

On June 19, he began feeling unwell, complaining of fever and a headache, and went to a chemist near where he lived to buy anti-malaria drugs and antibiotics to treat typhoid fever. "I thought that my symptoms indicated either malaria or typhoid because these are the most common ailments suffered by everybody here," said Kamara.

However his condition did not change and two days later he decided to seek proper treatment at the hospital. That was when the doctors discovered he was suffering from Ebola, a disease that causes fever, vomiting, bleeding and diarrhoea and kills up to 90 percent of those infected.

Kamara was admitted immediately and just seven days later he was discharged after receiving supportive treatment.

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Vandi said that "people are vehemently denying that Ebola exists despite the massive awareness raising that is going on, and those that do believe the illness exists are so afraid that they do not come to the hospital or bring their relatives when they are sick. That is how Ebola spreads in the community before we are aware of cases."

According to Vandi, people are accusing doctors of administering lethal injections to the Ebola patients or removing vital organs for sale in European markets. He said that some even claim that people are being deliberately infected with the virus to reduce the population.

As a result, doctors and nurses in the hospitals have been attacked and many nurses are not wearing their uniforms on the way to work for fear of being attacked in the streets.

"Patients who were admitted - both male and female - are abandoning the hospitals," said Vandi. "They are now going to pharmacies or being treated by quack doctors or nurses in their homes. This is worrisome because the signs and symptoms of Ebola mimic the prevalent malaria and typhoid fever in the country and, before they know what they are dealing with, it will be too late."

The Senior Human Rights Officer who heads the Human Rights Commission's Office in the Eastern Province, Hassan Yarjah, blames the government's Ebola awareness raising strategy for fanning mistrust and disbelief among people.

He pointed out that the eastern part of the country, in which almost all cases of Ebola have so far been identified, is an opposition stronghold. "What the central government is doing, which I think is wrong, is sending people to these communities that the people cannot identify with; they are parliamentarians, they are ministers, they are executives from the ruling All People's Congress party and this is a country where everything is polarised," he said.

More at http://allafrica.com/stories/201407130001.html

 

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Re: As Ebola stalks West Africa, medics fight mistrust, hostility

:tiphat: Carol @FW

Comment: None of these articles indicate that this oubreak will be brought under control anytime soon.

https://medium.com/matter/how-to-ignore-a-plague-14ea08694cc

Sierra Leone: How to Ignore a Plague
Escaped Ebola patients, besieged hospitals, and deadly denial in West Africa

In the doorway of an Ebola isolation facility in Kenema, Sierra Leone, stood a group of 10 or so patients. I could see them from a distance. I'd been advised by the medics not to get too close since I was not wearing protective clothing. They were mostly women, but I also saw two children: a boy and a girl. Ebola was eating him up. I was later told that the boy's name was Kinnie, and that he was five years old. I shouted across to him, but he was too emaciated and weak to reply.

Inside the isolation wards were dozens of people who had tested positive for the rampaging hemorrhagic fever, including at least five nurses. They had apparently been infected by patients who had not been suspected of carrying the virus. Until recently, health workers didn't use protective gloves unless they knew they were treating a confirmed case of Ebola, even though the virus is hard to diagnose, easily transmitted through bodily fluids, and Sierra Leone is in the middle of an outbreak that has stricken more than 300 and killed 92. One of the nurses died a few days ago. Her name was Sarah, and she got married last December. She was a few weeks pregnant.

Despite the danger facing these medical workers, they are being blamed for the disease by the public-a public so poorly informed about Ebola that many didn't know of its existence before the outbreak began.

A few yards from the isolation facility lay the main wards of the Kenema Government Hospital. Many patients there fled after one of the nurses tested positive, headed for who knows where. And a couple of days after I visited, a colleague of mine watched relatives of Ebola patients pelt the hospital itself with stones. Confirmed Ebola cases are quarantined, and the attackers accused the nurses of sorcery and demanded their sick relatives be released to them ,  if they were dead, they said, they wanted the bodies to bury themselves. Such is the respect and reverence people have for the dead that the way Ebola victims are laid to rest is hard for most to stomach. Medics place them into a bag, and bury them without ceremony in a mass grave. The confrontation became so violent that police used tear gas to disperse the crowds, and have remained in and around the hospital since.

It is amazing-shocking-to see the denial of so many people here. Just 500 yards from the hospital, a group of revelers stood outside a video center (as cinemas are known here), pulling on cigarettes and even sharing the same butt. Backslapping and hugging having just come from the unventilated room. Sweating profusely in the 90-degree heat. There are other such video centers throughout Kenema, all over Sierra Leone. Beneath the veneer of that excitement and camaraderie lies the acrid reality that Ebola is tearing the country apart. The next day, at the Holy Trinity Secondary School, I saw scores of high school kids playing soccer. Some had removed their white uniforms to avoid them getting dirty, and their bodies glistened. The longer they played, the more they sweated, and the more dangerous the game became for them. But they were either oblivious to the dangers of a virus that can kill nine in 10, often by internal bleeding and organ failure, or they did not care.

Continued: https://medium.com/matter/how-...