Lack Of Skills Hampering Ebola War –-Aid Agency

“All of our centres are overcrowded right now. We have an Ebola centre in Lofa county in Foya (Liberia) which is close to the epicentre. It was meant to be a centre with a capacity of 20 beds. We have more than 125 patients right now,” Liu said.

“The same thing with our centre in Monrovia, which we opened only last weekend, with 125 beds and now it’s already filled. We’re entertaining the idea of increasing the capacity, if not doubling it,” she said.

Security forces in the Liberian capital fired live rounds and tear gas on Wednesday to scatter a stone-throwing crowd trying to break an Ebola quarantine imposed on their neighbourhood.

“We are right now, I would say, in a state of global fear in Liberia,” Liu said.

“It’s paramount now to re-establish access to basic health care. Because we might be facing the ridiculous situation of having people dying more of non-Ebola pathologies than from Ebola. Right now in Monrovia for example, if you have malaria, nobody knows where to go and consult (for health care).”

Liu said that she had received an email from MSF staff with a sad and telling tale of pregnant women in Monrovia seeking a health care centre where they could safely give birth.

“We had this week six pregnant women who ended up walking for hours in the city trying to find a place to deliver and by the time they got to our centre, which was not the right place to be, the babies had died in their wombs,” she said.

“I find this identifies very well what we are facing in terms of having a health care system being collapsed from the Ebola epidemic.”

Western and African experts are needed to help with education to prevent spread of Ebola, trace contacts of infected people, and care for those in isolation wards, she added.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is sending some 55 epidemiologists, but more are needed, Liu said.

“The U.S., Canada, France, Germany, those big nations who have big schools of tropical disease, who have know-how in working in highly contagious set-ups, who can mobilise, who have money,” Liu said.

“But the reality is that all of us today are navigating in unknown waters. We’ve never faced something as big as this in the whole history of Ebola, it has never been as big, we have never faced Ebola in an urban setting.”