(Reuters) – Doctors in Liberia were out on strike on Tuesday as they struggled to cope with the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus, while the United Nations warned the spread of the disease in West Africa was causing food shortages in one of the world’s poorest regions.
Governments and aid organizations are scrambling to contain the disease, which has killed more than 1,500 since March. Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said 800 more beds for Ebola patients were urgently needed in the Liberian capital Monrovia alone, while in Sierra Leone highly infectious bodies were rotting in the streets.
MSF called for rich nations to send military medical teams to support buckling healthcare systems in West Africa.
U.S. missionary organization SIM USA said on Tuesday that an American doctor treating obstetrics patients at the ELWA hospital in Monrovia had tested positive for Ebola. The doctor, who was not working in the hospital’s Ebola treatment center, was in an isolation ward at the hospital and was responding well so far, SIM said on its Web site.
Scores of staff went on strike at the John F. Kennedy Medical Center (JFK) in Monrovia in a protest over unpaid bonuses and working conditions. More than 120 healthworkers have died in West Africa during the Ebola outbreak amid shortages of equipment and trained staff.
“Health workers have died (fighting Ebola), including medical doctors at … JFK and to have them come to work without food on their table, we think that is pathetic,” George Williams, secretary general of the Health Workers Association of Liberia, told Reuters.
Williams said healthcare workers at JFK, the country’s largest referral hospital, had gone unpaid for two months.
The strike followed a one-day protest over pay and conditions at the Connaught hospital in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown on Monday. Staff at the main Ebola clinic at Kenema in eastern Sierra Leone also walked off the job last week, in protest at conditions.
The World Health Organization and other international bodies are rushing to support fragile healthcare systems in affected countries, but additional staff and resources have been slow to arrive.
The president of MSF, Joanne Liu, said in a speech to U.N. members in New York that the outbreak was now an issue of international security and needed specialized biological disaster response teams to contain it, both civilian and military.
“Six months into the worst Ebola epidemic in history, the world is losing the battle to contain it,” Liu said, slamming what she called “a global coalition of inaction.”
Liu called for the urgent dispatch of field hospitals with isolation wards and mobile medical laboratories to West Africa.
Food Prices Surge
In Monrovia, MSF said its new ELWA 3 center, which has 160 beds, was already overflowing with patients. “Every day we have to turn sick people away because we are too full,” said Stefan Liljegren, MSF coordinator at the site.
Putting further pressure on the ability of the region’s governments to spend money on healthcare, the epidemic has also put harvests at risk and sent food prices soaring in West Africa, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said.
The FAO issued a special alert over food security for Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the three countries most affected by the outbreak, which was detected in the forests of southeastern Guinea in March.
Restrictions on people’s movements and the establishment of quarantine zones to contain the spread of the hemorrhagic fever has led to panic buying, food shortages and price hikes in countries ill-prepared to absorb the shock.
“Even prior to the Ebola outbreak, households in some of the most affected areas were spending up to 80 percent of their incomes on food,” said Vincent Martin, head of an FAO unit in Dakar coordinating the agency’s response. “Now these latest price spikes are effectively putting food completely out of their reach.”
The director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Tom Frieden, said the outbreak was accelerating very fast and urged more global support to combat it.
“It’s spiraling out of control. The situation is bad and it looks like it’s going to get worse quickly. There is still a window of opportunity to tamp it down but that window is closing,” he told NBC News following a visit to the region.
“This is different than every other Ebola situation we’ve ever had. It’s spreading widely, throughout entire countries, through multiple countries, in cities and very fast,” he said.
Frieden called on health officials to reverse the outbreak by sending in more resources and specialized workers, adding that the U.S. government now had 70 people in the region.
The death toll from an Ebola outbreak in the Djera region of northern Democratic Republic of Congo has risen to 31, Minister of Health Felix Kabange Numbi told Reuters on Tuesday.
Virological analysis: no link between Ebola outbreaks in west Africa and Democratic Republic of Congo
Results from virus sequencing of samples from the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were received last night. The virus is the Zaire strain, in a lineage most closely related to a virus from the 1995 Ebola outbreak in Kikwit, DRC.
The Zaire strain of the virus is indigenous in the country. Ebola first emerged in 1976 in almost simultaneous outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire) and South Sudan (then Sudan).
Confirmatory testing was done at Gabon’s Centre International de Recherches Médicales in Franceville, a WHO collaborating centre. Earlier, testing in DRC confirmed Ebola in 6 of 8 samples.
The outbreak is located in the remote Boende district, Equateur province in the north-western part of the country.
Results from virus characterization, together with findings from the epidemiological investigation, are definitive: the outbreak in DRC is a distinct and independent event, with no relationship to the outbreak in west Africa.
As the Gabon laboratory report clearly stated, “the virus in the Boende district is definitely not derived from the virus strain currently circulating in west Africa.”
These findings are reassuring, as they exclude the possibility that the virus has spread from West to Central Africa.
Epidemiological investigation has linked the index case, who died on 11 August, to the preparation of bushmeat for consumption.
This is the country’s seventh Ebola outbreak since 1976. The introduction of the virus into the human population following contact with infected bushmeat (usually fruit bats or monkeys) is consistent with the pattern seen at the start of previous outbreaks. The virus is now spreading from person to person.
The response team has, to date, identified 53 cases consistent with the case definition for Ebola virus disease, including 31 deaths. Seven of these deaths were among health care workers. More than 160 contacts are being traced.
The government has rapidly mounted a robust response by reactivating emergency committees at national, provincial, and local levels, setting up isolation centres, and providing community leaders with facts about the disease. The government will ensure that all burials are safe.
The WHO team confirmed that collaboration between the government and its key partners is excellent.
The outbreak zone, where the most intense transmission is occurring, is remote, located some 1200 kilometres from the capital city, Kinshasa. No paved roads run from the outbreak zone to Kinshasa. However, cases have been detected or transmission is ongoing at three sites, underscoring the need to watch the outbreak’s evolution closely.
Motorcycles, canoes, and satellite phones have been supplied to facilitate outbreak investigation and contact tracing. A dedicated helicopter will be made available soon.