Liberia battled yesterday to halt the spread of the Ebola disease in its crowded, run-down oceanside capital Monrovia, recording the latest deaths, as fatalities from the world’s worst outbreak of the deadly virus rose above 1,200.
The epidemic of the hemorrhagic disease, which can kill up to 90 per cent of those it infects, is ravaging the West African states of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, and also has a toehold in Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy.
As the Geneva-based World Health Organisation rushed to ramp up the global response to the outbreak, including emergency food deliveries to quarantined zones, it announced that deaths from it had risen to 1,299 as of Saturday, out of 2,240 cases.
Between August 14 and 16, Liberia recorded the most new deaths, 53, followed by Sierra Leone with 17 and Guinea with 14.
On a more hopeful note, the WHO expressed “cautious optimism” that the spread of the Ebola outbreak in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation where four deaths out of 12 confirmed cases have been recorded since July, could be stopped.
It described the situation in Guinea, where the virus made its first appearance in West Africa in December, as “less alarming” than in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The WHO said it was working with the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) to ensure food delivery to one million people living in Ebola quarantine zones cordoned off by local security forces in a border zone of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
“Providing regular food supplies is a potent means of limiting unnecessary movement,” it said.
Besides infection in border zones, Liberia is fighting to stop the spread of the virus in the poorest neighbourhoods of its capital, such as the West Point slum where at the weekend a rock-throwing crowd attacked a temporary holding centre for suspected Ebola cases, 17 of whom fled.
As fears of wider contagion increased – Ebola is spread by contact with the bodily fluids of infected people – Liberia sent police to track down the fugitive suspected cases.
“We are glad to confirm that all of the 17 individuals have been accounted for and have now been transferred to JFK Ebola specialist treatment centre,” Liberia’s Information Minister Lewis Brown told Reuters yesterday.
In Monrovia, three African healthcare workers were given the rare experimental ZMapp drug, which has already been used on two American aid workers being treated in the United States after being evacuated from Liberia with Ebola.
Lewis said that the three Africans treated with ZMapp were showing “remarkable signs of improvement”.
However, the manufacturer of the drug, California-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, has already said its scarce supplies have been exhausted.