The World Health Organization has announced that Ebola victims in Liberia will be confined to camps as medical facilities can no longer cope with the influx of patients. The idea is to isolate these people from those caring for them in order to reduce the spread of the deadly disease.
From the Washington Post:
MONROVIA, Liberia — Looking for a new approach to blunt the Ebola epidemic sweeping West Africa, the Liberian government, the World Health Organization and their nonprofit partners here are launching an ambitious but controversial program to move infected people out of their homes and into ad hoc centers that will provide rudimentary care, officials said Monday.
The effort, which is expected to begin in the next few weeks, is an intermediate step, officials said. The goal is to reduce the chances that Ebola patients will infect their own families and others while ensuring that they receive basic care — such as food, water and pain medicine — at a time when many hospitals and treatment centers are closed. Read more…
Note the words rudimentary care…These centres will not solve the problems Ebola is causing. For a start you have to get the patients to the camp treatment centre without further contaminating other people. Then you have to have a means of keeping them there without passing the disease to the guards attendants who will be going home each night. You have to get food and water in and waste out…unless that’s not the idea at all.
If the proposal is to lock them in and keep them in, in order to let the disease burn itself out well that’s a different thing altogether, I suppose you could just torch the place afterwards…
For those fortunate people that manage to avoid being rounded up and sent to death camps there is an increasing problem of where their final resting place will be. The cemeteries are filling at a rapid rate. Indicating that the epidemic is already far worse than the authorities admit to.James Hamilton, chief gravedigger at the King Tom Cemetary said ” much more space is needed”. The supervisor at the cemetery has recorded 110 Ebola burials this week, in one cemetery in Freetown, he does not comment on other cemeteries in Freetown. Sierra Leone has officially recorded only 10 deaths due to Ebola in the city. (source and read more)
Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation is warning that unless Ebola is brought under control and fast we could be looking at a situation where the disease is permanently circulating amongst African populations. With the death rate increasing, now about 70% of those contracting Ebola die from it.
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