SYDNEY Dec 3 AAP – Australian Greens Senator Richard Di Natale has spent his first days in Liberia observing the Ebola crisis.
SPEAKING by phone from Monrovia on Wednesday, Senator Di Natale said the human cost of the epidemic continues to unfold.
The World Health Organisation says more than 6000 people have died from Ebola in the three hardest hit countries in west Africa. In Liberia, the worst affected, 3145 people had died out of a total of 7635 cases as of November 28. “It’s a humanitarian disaster and long after the Ebola crisis has been dealt with there is going to be a lasting legacy in these countries,” Senator Di Natale told AAP on Wednesday. “This is a very poor country and the first thing that strikes you is that it is a country that is already on the back of a civil war, and the infrastructure is just so inadequate. “It’s in that context that this outbreak has occurred.” He spent Tuesday with a Red Cross burial team, which has the gruesome task of collecting the dead. Senator Di Natale also met with officials from the Liberian Foreign Ministry, and deputy ministers, and had a briefing with Medecins Sans Frontieres. Officials told Senator Di Natale there are major concerns for remote villages, where cases of Ebola often go unreported. “The concern, of course, is it has the potential to wipe out an entire village without getting immediate assistance, and getting assistance into remote village is very difficult,” he said. On Thursday the senator will meet with Liberia’s deputy prime minister and will sit on a planning meeting involving officials from the WHO, the US Centre for Disease Control and various health ministries and key non-government organisations. The WHO on Tuesday reported a total of 6055 deaths in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone since the beginning of the latest Ebola outbreak, up from 5987 a few days earlier. The death toll elsewhere remains the same – six in Mali, one in the United States, and eight in Nigeria, which was declared Ebola-free in October. Senator Di Natale will also visit Sierra Leone.