Sierra Leone records 130 new Ebola cases during three-day lockdown
Sierra Leone recorded 130 new cases of the Ebola virus during a three-day lockdown and it is waiting for test results on a further 39 suspected cases, Stephen Gaojia, head of the Ebola Emergency Operations Centre, said on Monday.
The country had ordered its six million citizens to stay indoors until Sunday night in the most extreme strategy employed by a West African nation since the start of an epidemic that has infected 5,762 people since March and killed 2,793 of those.
“The exercise has been largely successful … The outreach was just overwhelming. There was massive awareness of the disease,” Gaojia said, noting that authorities reached more than 80 percent of the households they had intended to target.
Sierra Leone now needs to focus on treatment and case management and it urgently needs treatment centers in all its 14 districts as well as “foot soldiers” in clinics and hospitals, he said.
“We need clinicians, epidemiologists, lab technicians, infection-control practitioners and nurses,” he said.
The hemorrhagic fever, which has struck mainly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, is the worst since Ebola was identified in 1976 in the forests of central Africa. At least 562 have died in Sierra Leone.
The lockdown was intended to allow 30,000 health workers, volunteers and teachers to visit every household. Some argued it might have a negative impact on Sierra Leone’s poor.
Ebola outbreak ‘pretty much contained’ in Senegal and Nigeria
Two of the five countries affected by the world’s worst-ever Ebola outbreak are managing to halt the spread of the disease, the World Health Organization said on Monday, although the overall death toll has risen to 2,811 out of 5,864 cases.
“On the whole, the outbreaks in Senegal and Nigeria are pretty much contained,” said an update from WHO’s regional director in Africa.
Only one case has been reported in Senegal and all contacts with the patient have now completed a 21-day follow-up, the incubation period of the disease, with no further cases of the virus found, a second WHO statement said.
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In Nigeria, the number of cases has been cut from 21 to 20 after a suspected case was ruled out and 696 contacts have completed the 21-day follow-up. Three were still being monitored in Lagos and 175 in Port Harcourt, the WHO said.
In the three worst-hit countries – Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea – the disease continued to spread, with a first confirmed case in the Guinean district of Kindia, and a rising death toll in all three.
More than half of all the deaths have occurred in Liberia, where 1,578 have died. Another 632 have died in Guinea and 593 in Sierra Leone.
Ebola statistics are based on multiple sources of information and the number of cases – divided between suspected, probable and confirmed cases – can be revised.
One unexplained figure in the latest data was for the number of health workers who have died in Sierra Leone. At 61 deaths as of Sept 19, it was almost double the 31 recorded in the WHO’s previous update, at the end of Sept 14.
A WHO spokeswoman said she could not immediately explain the apparent leap in the number of dead Sierra Leone health workers.
A separate Ebola outbreak has killed 41 people in Democratic Republic of Congo, where 68 cases were reported as at Sept 18.
Congo’s Ebola outbreak ‘almost over’, prime minister says
An outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Democratic Republic of Congo, unrelated to the epidemic in West Africa, is “almost over” with no new cases detected for several days, Prime Minister Augustin Matata Ponyo said.
The government body coordinating the response to Ebola released data on Monday showing Congo had recorded 68 cases in Equateur province since August. Four previously suspected cases had tested negative, but one new case was added.
Congo has registered 41 deaths from its outbreak.
“Ebola outbreak in DRC almost over,” Matata Ponyo said on his official Twitter account. “No new case recorded for nearly 10 days.”
Unlike West African states, Congo has experience fighting Ebola. However, aid workers are likely to be cautious about declaring victory over the disease after governments in West Africa appeared to downplay the threat of the virus there in the early stages of the outbreak.
A spokesman for French medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, which has some 40 aid workers helping Congo fight the illness, said it was not in a position to say whether the disease was under control.
The Ebola outbreak in Congo was first declared in the Djera area of the province of Equateur on Aug. 24. Unlike the crisis in West Africa, the disease is contained in distant, thickly forested regions with low population density.
West Africa’s Ebola outbreak began in Guinea’s southeast and the government said several times it was controlling the disease, however it gradually spread into the capital, Conakry, and then into neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Nigeria and Senegal recorded cases but appear to have contained the disease.
The World Health Organization says over 2,800 people have now been killed, about half of all those infected. Experts say the number of cases is likely to exceed 20,000 before the disease can be brought under control.
Source: Reuters