Liberia on Wednesday declared a state of emergency due to the deadly Ebola outbreak, as US President Barack Obama said it was premature to send experimental drugs to victims in Africa.
Declaring the state of emergency overnight, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf warned that the extraordinary measures were needed “for the very survival of our state.”
The Liberian parliament was to meet yesterday to ratify the move, while its Sierra Leone counterpart does the same following a state-of-emergency declaration there last week.
Photo: EPA
Speaking of “a clear and present danger” from the virus that has claimed almost 1,000 lives in west Africa, Sirleaf said the state of emergency would last for a minimum of 90 days.
“The scope and scale of the epidemic, the virulence and deadliness of the virus now exceed the capacity and statutory responsibility of any one government agency or ministry,” she said.
Amid growing call for international help, Obama said it was too early to dispatch experimental drugs to Ebola victims in Africa
Two Americans who worked for Christian aid agencies in Liberia were brought back to the US for treatment in recent days. They are being given an experimental drug known as ZMapp, which is hard to produce on a large scale, and have been showing signs of improvement.
The latest official toll across West Africa hit 932 deaths since the start of the year, the WHO said, with 1,711 confirmed cases, mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Fears are growing that the disease is also taking hold in Nigeria.
The death of a nurse in Lagos, a megacity of more than 20 million, came as 45 deaths were confirmed across west Africa from Saturday to Monday, with aid agencies, including Doctors Without Borders, saying the terrifying tropical disease is out of control.
Nigerian Minister of Health Onyebuchi Chukwu told reporters he was in contact with the US Centers for Disease Control on the possibility of getting drugs from them.
“I said we are getting reports that this experimental drug seems to be useful. Is it also possible that we can have access for our people presently being treated and under incubation,” he said.
However, Obama said affected countries should focus on building a “strong public infrastructure,” adding: “I don’t think all the information is in on whether this drug is helpful.”
Chukwu said all seven confirmed cases in his country had “primary contact” with Patrick Sawyer, a Liberian finance ministry employee who brought the virus to Lagos on July 20 and died later in hospital.
The spread of the disease comes as the WHO met in an emergency session in Geneva to decide whether to declare an international crisis.
The closed-door WHO meeting was not expected to make a decision until today, but the session itself underscored the severity of the threat posed by the disease, which causes severe fever and unstoppable bleeding.
In Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, the dead have been left unburied on the streets or abandoned in their homes.
And in Sierra Leone, which has the most confirmed infections, 800 troops — including 50 military nurses — were sent to guard hospitals and clinics treating Ebola patients, an army spokesman said.
The soldiers’ colleagues coming to the end of a tour with the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia were ordered on Wednesday to remain in the war-torn country rather than risk returning home because of Ebola.
Meanwhile, an elderly Spanish priest infected with the virus in Liberia landed in Madrid yesterday, the first patient in the fast-spreading outbreak to be evacuated to Europe for treatment.
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