With Aid Doctors Gone, Ebola Fight Grows Harder By SHERI FINKAUG. 16, 2014 Continue reading the main story Slide Show Slide Show|12 Photos Battling Ebola in Liberia Battling Ebola in Liberia CreditJohn Moore/Getty Images Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Share This Page email facebook twitter save more Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Top Stories This article and others like it are part of our new subscription. Learn More » When people started dying of Ebola in Liberia, Clarine Vaughn faced a wrenching choice: Should she send home, for their own health and safety, four American doctors working for Heartt, the aid group she led there? Or should she keep them in the country without proper supplies or training to fight the virulent, contagious disease, which was already spreading panic? After much agonizing, Ms. Vaughn, who lives in Liberia, pulled the doctors out and canceled plans to bring in more. The African physicians and nurses left behind told her they understood, but felt abandoned. They said, “We need you guys here,” she recalled. Since then, Ms. Vaughn has wondered if the American doctors might have made a difference, and she asked the aid group AmeriCares to help. It sent in a planeload of supplies that landed in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, last Sunday. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage 3 Liberian Health Workers With Ebola Receive Scarce Drug After Appeals to U.S.AUG. 16, 2014 The departure of many Western development workers from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the West African countries hit hardest by Ebola, has further weakened the region’s understaffed health systems at the very moment they are facing one of the most volatile public health crises ever. Liberia, population four million, has fewer than 250 doctors left in the entire country, according to the Liberia Medical and Dental Council. Seven doctors there have contracted Ebola, and two of them have died. Continue reading the main story Video Play Video|1:29 Modern Technologies and the Ebola Fight Modern Technologies and the Ebola Fight How some modern technologies — from airport screening to cellphones — may help in the fight to contain the Ebola virus. Video Credit By Emily B. Hager and Christian Roman on Publish Date August 16, 2014. “The locals’ seeing this mass exodus of expatriates has contributed to the sense that there’s an apocalypse happening and they’re in it on their own,” said Raphael Frankfurter, executive director of the Wellbody Alliance, which provides clinical services in a diamond-mining district of Sierra Leone bordering Guinea, where the outbreak began. Mr. Frankfurter, too, sent his four American volunteers home for fear they might fall ill. They left behind 160 Liberian staff members. “It’s certainly not in line with our values, because it’s just such a glaring inequality,” he said. But “it’s a very scary place to get sick right now.” As an array of international organizations, wealthy countries and charitable groups gear up to provide desperately needed resources to fight the outbreak, the absent doctors and volunteers are a reminder of the daunting practical obstacles. Many African health workers battling Ebola are contracting it themselves. At least 170 workers have gotten the disease, according to the World Health Organization, and more than 80 have died. Those sickened include Dr. Kent Brantly, an American now recovering in an Atlanta hospital after receiving ZMapp, an experimental drug. Three Liberian patients received ZMapp on Friday, according to Tolbert G. Nyenswah, a Liberian assistant minister of health and social welfare. The patients signed consent forms stating that they understood the risks of the untested drug, and waived liability for any adverse effects. The doses had been flown into Liberia after appeals from President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia to President Obama and senior American officials. Its arrival last week lifted morale and “raised the hope of everybody,” Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf said. The situation, however, was volatile. On Saturday afternoon, several hundred people in an area of Monrovia known as the West Point slum broke through the gates of a former school that had been converted days earlier into a holding center for people with suspected Ebola. Continue reading the main story Samuel Tarplah, 48, a nurse running the center, said Saturday evening that the protesters wanted to shut it down. “They told us that we don’t want an Ebola holding center in our community.” He said the intruders stole mattresses, personal protective equipment, even buckets of chlorine that had just been delivered. “They took everything.” Fear is complicating the huge increase in aid that is needed: food for people in areas that have been cordoned off; laboratory supplies to test for the disease; gloves, face masks and gowns to protect health workers; body bags for the dead; bedsheets to replace those that must be burned. Airlines have canceled flights that could have carried in such supplies, despite assurances from the W.H.O. that properly screened passengers pose little risk. Positions on aid teams remain unfilled. Hundreds of workers for Doctors Without Borders have fought the outbreak since March. The group’s president, Dr. Joanne Liu, said there was an acute need for materials as well as for more human resources — and not just experts and bureaucrats, but also the kind of person who is ready to “roll up his sleeves.” Continue reading the main story Related in Opinion Editorial: A Painfully Slow Ebola ResponseAUG. 15, 2014 Op-Ed Contributors: Can Statins Help Treat Ebola?AUG. 15, 2014 “What we have to keep in mind is we are facing today the most devastating and biggest Ebola epidemic of the modern times,” Dr. Liu said. “There is fear, there is a front line, the epidemic is advancing, and there is a collapse of infrastructure.” A more muscular effort to fight the outbreak began lumbering to life over the past week. The newly appointed United Nations coordinator for Ebola, Dr. David Nabarro, wrote in an email that he had his “head right down working through some extremely challenging stuff under tight time pressure.” “All of us are going to have to perform in an outstanding way over some months,” Dr. Nabarro added in a phone interview. “For many, the image is fearful to a degree that it makes it very hard indeed for them to do anything other than think about their safety and the safety of those they love.” nytimes/2014/08/17/world/africa/with-aid-doctors-gone-ebola-fight-grows-harder.html?emc=edit_th_20140817&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=66311587&_r=0
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 12:03:27 +0000