Guinea on Wednesdsay declared an Ebola outbreak that has killed 377 in the nation a “health emergency,” and more flights from hard-hit west African countries were canceled as the region awaited shipments of experimental vaccine.
Guinean President Alpha Conde announced a series of measures, including strict controls at border points, travel restrictions and a ban on moving bodies “from one town to another until the end of the epidemic.”
In addition, all suspected victims will automatically be hospitalized until they are cleared of infection, Conde said.
As the region scrambled to halt the spread of the virus, Gambia suspended all flights from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to a transport ministry document obtained by Agence France-Presses on Wednesday.
The death toll in the worst epidemic of Ebola since its discovery four decades ago climbed to 1,069 on Wednesday, according to the WHO, which said 56 people had died in two days. Nearly 2,000 have now been infected.
Canadian Health Minister Rona Ambrose said between 800 to 1,000 doses of a vaccine called VSV-EBOV, which has shown promise in animal research but never been tested on humans, would be distributed through the WHO.
Hard-hit nations were also anxiously awaiting a consignment of up to 1,000 doses of the barely-tested drug ZMapp from the US, which has raised hopes of saving hundreds infected with the disease.
The virus has hit doctors hard in the ill-equipped and fragile health systems of the worst-affected nations of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Liberia is trying to save the lives of two infected doctors and is hoping that the ZMapp serum, which has shown positive early results, arrives in time. Sierra Leone’s health ministry spokesman Sidi Yahya Tunis said the country had officially requested a shipment of the drug as the nation lost its second top doctor to the virus.
The death of Modupeh Cole, a senior physician in the capital, Freetown, came just two weeks after the country’s only virologist and leading Ebola expert, Umar Khan, died of the tropical disease.
There is currently no available cure or vaccine for Ebola, which the WHO has declared a global public health emergency, and the use of experimental drugs has stoked a fierce debate.
The number of confirmed Ebola cases in Nigeria has risen by one to 11, Nigerian Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said yesterday.
The figure includes three deaths and eight people who are being treated at a special isolation unit set up in Lagos, a megacity of more than 20 million people, the minister told reporters.
Nigeria has not recorded a case outside Lagos, but there were fears that a nurse who was infected in the city may have carried the virus to the key eastern city of Enugu.
The nurse was among those who treated Liberian government employee Patrick Sawyer, who brought Ebola to Lagos on July 20. He died in hospital on July 25.
After contracting the virus, the nurse traveled to Enugu, where she began showing symptoms before being transported back to Lagos for treatment.
Officials on Wednesday said 21 people in Enugu who had contact with the nurse were being monitored.
However, Chukwu yesterday said that 15 of those people had been cleared, with only six in Enugu still being watched.
The number of people under surveillance for possible infection in Lagos was reduced from 177 to 169 overnight, Chukwu added.
Meanwhile, Singapore’s Straits Times reported yesterday that a Nigerian woman sent to a Singapore hospital isolation unit yesterday does not have Ebola as initially suspected.
Philip Choo, chief executive of the government hospital where the woman was sent, said it was a false alarm and the woman had been discharged, the newspaper said.
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