Senegal, which closed its border to Guinea to stave off Ebola last month, said on Saturday that it has now opened up a humanitarian corridor at an airport to help speed aid to stricken countries.
An airplane carrying workers with the UN’s World Food Programme arriving from the Guinean capital, Conakry, landed at the designated humanitarian air corridor on a military air base near Dakar, AFP reported.
‘SOLIDARITY’
Photo: AFP
Senegalese Minister of Health Awa Marie Coll Seck said Dakar had reached an agreement with international aid groups and Western states to use an air corridor “to send equipment, medicines and to support human resources in order to save human lives.”
Coll Seck, speaking alongside Senegalese, UN and NGO officials, told journalists that the airport access was opened up “in the context of international solidarity.”
A Senegalese official said that the corridor had been operational for two days, but was still being set up.
3,000 DEAD
Dakar first offered on Sept. 8 to allow access to air carriers delivering relief to Ebola-struck Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, where more than 3,000 people have died in the outbreak.
Senegal reported only one case of the deadly virus, found in a Guinean student who crossed into the nation just before it shut its land border on Aug. 21.
Authorities reported that the man has since recovered.
Ivory Coast, which also closed its borders in a bid to keep Ebola from spreading, created a humanitarian corridor to neighboring Guinea and Liberia earlier this month.
Liberia has been hit the hardest by the tropical hemorrhagic fever, with 3,458 infections and 1,830 deaths, according to a World Health Organization count released on Saturday.
In Guinea, where the outbreak began late last year, Ebola has infected 1,074 people, killing 648, while in Sierra Leone 2,021 have been infected and 605 killed.
GLOBAL RESPONSE
World leaders led by US President Barack Obama have pledged new rounds of aid to fight Ebola, and the IMF on Friday fast-tracked US$130 million to dispatch to the three west African states.
The UN has estimated that nearly US$1 billion will be required to effectively fight the escalating epidemic, and its health agency has said that without quicker prevention efforts, hundreds of thousands could be infected with Ebola by the end of the year.
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