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 yesterday.
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 per cent of the households they had intended to target.
Sierra Leone now needs to focus on treatment and case management and it urgently needs treatment centres in all its 14 districts as well as “foot soldiers” in clinics and hospitals, he said.
Elderly Spanish priest in serious condition but will not receive experimental drug ZMapp as world supplies are exhausted
“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.
Meanwhile an elderly Spanish priest infected with the Ebola virus is in a serious condition and will not receive the experimental drug ZMapp because world supplies are exhausted, Madrid health authorities said yesterday. Manuel Garcia Viejo, 69, was taken to Madrid’s Carlos III hospital at about 0200 GMT after he was repatriated from Sierra Leone.
“The patient is badly dehydrated and his kidneys and liver are affected,” said Francisco Arnalich, who oversees internal medicine at the hospital. “His situation at the moment is serious.”
Garcia, who was the medical director of the Hospital Order of San Juan de Dios, was diagnosed in Sierra Leone in the Western city of Lunsar, and flown home on Sunday, after a three-day lockdown in the African country ended. Madrid authorities said the drug ZMapp, used to treat two American aid workers and a British nurse, who all recovered, was no longer available. Medical staff are studying various other experimental treatments including one that gives sufferers a dose of serum from a recovered Ebola victim.
Garcia is the second Spanish priest to be diagnosed and repatriated with Ebola after Miguel Pajares, who received ZMapp but died last month days after being brought back to Spain from Liberia.