“We believe we can overcome this fight,” Lewis Brown, Liberia’s Minister of Information, told National Geographic this week. “We are beginning to see evidence of that in some of the places that we had considered earlier to be the epicenters of this disease. The challenge now is in Monrovia.”
But the challenge came to a head last weekend when a mob of Monrovians overran an isolation facility in the slum known as West Point, moved out at least 17 suspected patients and their relatives, and made off with contaminated beds and other materials. Brown said that all 17 have since been found and sent to the John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Monrovia. But West Point’s 50,000 people are now under quarantine.
It was especially frightening to one observer who watched last weekend’s mob touching and holding the people leaving the facility, since one of the main weapons in staunching the spread of Ebola is to avoid direct contact with people who have the disease.
“You cannot touch your loved ones when they are dead,” wrote Mohammed Fobio, a 24-year-old university student in Monrovia, in a letter published in the World Post. “You cannot even go to them. I mean you cannot even touch your sick father.”
Fobio said the situation in his city, which “cannot even provide medication for its citizens under normal circumstances,” is “terrifying.”
Source link : https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/140820-ebola-virus-liberia-monrovia-health-africa
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Publish date : 2014-08-20 07:00:00
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