Ebola: Health minister under quarantine in Liberia

Health care workers leaving a high-risk area at the Medecins Sans Frontieres’ Elwa Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia

The damage being done by the Ebola Virus Disease in Liberia has been underscored by the quarantine of the country’s deputy health minister. The minister, Dr. Bernice Dahn, placed herself in quarantine following the Ebola death of her assistant, health officials and humanitarian sources said on Sunday.

The minister’s assistant died of the infectious disease on Thursday.

Dahn and her assistant’s staff, whom she also quarantined, will remain under observation for 21 days for the full incubation period of the tropical fever that has killed more than 3,000 people since the end of last year.

Of the four West African nations affected by the Ebola outbreak, Liberia has been hit the hardest, with 3,458 people infected, and 1,830 of killed by the disease, according to a WHO data released Saturday.

In Monrovia, “about 50 bodies are incinerated each day, though we estimate that 20 to 30 per cent of those did not have Ebola,” a WHO official who requested anonymity said, suggesting an Ebola toll of 35 to 40 victims each day in the Liberian capital.

“This is a slow rise, and it only includes the cases that have been officially tallied. There are still people who continue to bury their dead secretly in their gardens,” he said.

The US federal health body Centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that only about 40 percent of Ebola cases are being announced in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the worst-affected states.

The virus can fell its victims within days, causing rampant fever, severe muscle pain, vomiting, diarrhoea and, in many cases, unstoppable internal and external bleeding.

Liberia’s decrepit public health infrastructure, ruined by 14 years of civil war to 2003 and endemic poverty, has “totally collapsed” under the Ebola crisis, the WHO official said