Associated Press Nurses are instructed on the correct use of protective masks during an Ebola training session in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Picture: Michael DuffFreetown - A leading charity warned on Thursday that the current rate of five new Ebola infections per hour in Sierra Leone has brought the country's health-care system to a breaking point.
“The number of new cases (is) doubling every three weeks,” said Rob MacGillivray, Save The Children country director in Sierra Leone.
Demand for treatment facilities “is far outstripping supply”, he said.
Sierra Leone has only 327 hospital beds, and “untold numbers of children are dying anonymously at home or in the streets”, Save The Children said. Unhospitalised patients lack isolation, so the Ebola virus continues to spread “at a terrifying rate”.
Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea are bearing the brunt of the world's worst outbreak of the haemorrhagic fever, with 3 338 deaths and an infection rate of 1.7 - 17 new people infected for every 10 that contract the virus, the organisation said.
The United Nations is still waiting for donor governments to fulfil the call for $1-billion to treat and isolate patients to halt the spread in West Africa, where at least 3 300 people have already died of Ebola, by World Health Organisation counts.
At a donor's conference convened by the British and Sierra Leone governments, delegates in London were warned that doctors and scientists were in a race against time to find a medical solution to the outbreak.
The partial withdrawal of British aid to two of the world's poorest countries may have contributed to the spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa, parliamentarians said at the conference.
Britain has pledged 700 new hospital beds for Sierra Leone and has more than 40 British military personnel and aid experts working there. More than 160 staff members of Britain's National Health Service have volunteered to help contain the disease in West Africa.
Liberal Democrat lawmaker Sir Malcolm Bruce said the scale of the crisis may be connected to declining levels of international support for health system improvements in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The WHO and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have said there is a 90-day window to halt the spread of Ebola before it reaches a potential 1.5 million infections by January.
Cuban President Raul Castro saw off the first medical team of 63 doctors and 102 nurses leaving Havana to help fight Ebola in Sierra Leone, the Cuban Communist Party daily Granma reported on Thursday.
Liberia's government said it “regrets” that a man was diagnosed with Ebola after arrival in the United States, five days after leaving Monrovia.
The Liberian reportedly in his mid-40s - who left September 19 for Texas - is the first case of the current Ebola strain diagnosed outside of Africa.
The patient, who worked as a driver for a cargo company, helped to transport his pregnant sister-in-law to a hospital in the capital after she tested positive for Ebola, neighbours and government officials said.
Information Minister Lewis Brown assured the international community that measures to screen for Ebola symptoms at Liberia's international airports and exit points were “stringent”.
“We understand his tests, like all others who are being permitted to travel... showed he manifested no signs of fever or any other symptoms of the virus,” said Brown, noting that the incident demonstrated “a clear international dimension of the Ebola crisis”.
The man did not have a fever when he left Liberia and only developed symptoms on September 24, CDC director Tom Frieden said. He stressed any new Ebola cases in the US could be quickly contained, but that for the disease to be halted it would have to be controlled in Africa.
“The bottom line here is we can't make the risk zero until the outbreak is controlled in West Africa,” he told reporters.
The Texas Department of State Health Services said: “Out of an abundance of caution, public health experts are investigating about 100 potential or possible contacts with the patient.”
The number of people on the list will drop as investigators focus on people whose contact represents a potential risk of infection, authorities said.
Four people at the flat where the Liberian was visiting have been quarantined and are being monitored for symptoms, said David Lakey, commissioner of the Texas Health Department.
Doctors in the southern German city of Frankfurt were preparing for the arrival of an aid worker in West Africa who has fallen ill with the Ebola virus.
One Ebola patient had already been brought to Germany at the end of August and treated in the northern city of Hamburg. - Sapa-dpa
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