Health workers have gone on strike at a major state-run Ebola treatment centre in Sierra Leone over pay and poor working conditions.
“The workers decided to stop working because we have not been paid our allowances and we lack some tools,” Ishmael Mehemoh, chief supervisor at the Kenema clinic in the country’s east, said.
Mr Mehemoh said clothing to protect health workers being infected was inadequate and there was only one broken stretcher to carry both patients and corpses, increasing the risk of infection.
In a further sign of strained resources, nurses and members of the burial team at Kenema said the government had stopped paying their wages of $US50 a week.
Sierra Leone has only one other Ebola treatment centre, however the World Health Organisation (WHO) shut the laboratory this week and withdrew staff from the Kailahun facility after one of its health workers caught the virus there.
The country’s government is struggling to cope with the worst Ebola outbreak in history which has killed more than 1,550 people across West Africa, with the rate of infection still rising.
More than 120 health workers have died from the virus across the region.
In Kenema 26 staff members have already died from Ebola, following the death of physician Sahr Rogers.
“It is with a deep sense of sadness that we have lost one of our finest physicians in the line of duty at a time like when we need a lot of them to help in out fight against Ebola,” Sierra Leone’s new health minister Abubakarr Fofana said on Saturday.
His predecessor, Miatta Kargbo, was sacked the previous day over her handling of the Ebola outbreak.
Transmitted through the blood, sweat and vomit of the infected, Ebola has spread quickly among health care workers who often lack the equipment to protect themselves from the virus.
Liberia lifts quarantine measures in West Point
In neighbouring Liberia, where infection rates are highest, the government lifted quarantine measures in the seaside neighbourhood of West Point in Morovia.
In mid-August West Point residents were forcibly cut off from the rest of the capital after a crowd attacked an Ebola centre there, allowing the sick to flee.
The quarantine sparked protests and security forces responded with tear gas and bullets, killing a teenage boy.
President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf had sought to quell criticism of the government’s response by issuing orders threatening officials with dismissal for failing to report for work or for fleeing the country, and has ordered an investigation into the West Point shooting.
Liberia plans to build five new Ebola treatment centres each with capacity for 100 beds, government and health officials said.
Two African doctors infected with Ebola had been released from hospital in Monrovia after being treated with the experimental drug ZMapp. A third doctor who was given the treatment died this week.
In Senegal local residents said health ministry officials had arrived to spray disinfectant at a local grocer’s shop and at the home of a Guinean student who had become the country’s first confirmed case of Ebola.
The student’s sister and mother had died from Ebola, Guinean health ministry sources said.
Many Dakar residents have worried that the student could have spread the highly contagious virus in the three weeks since he was last reported in Guinea.
Reuters