The international community has made “almost zero” response to the Ebola outbreak in west Africa, with Western leaders more interested in protecting their own countries than helping contain the crisis that has now claimed more than 1,200 lives, a senior aid worker said on Tuesday.
Brice de la Vigne, the operations director of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), said politicians in industrialized countries urgently needed to take action, or risk the outbreak spreading much further.
“Globally, the response of the international community is almost zero,” he told the Guardian. “Leaders in the West are talking about their own safety and doing things like closing airlines — and not helping anyone else.”
The hemorrhagic disease, which kills up to 90 percent of those infected, is ravaging Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, and also has a toehold in Nigeria.
De la Vigne, who has just returned from a tour of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, said the scale of the outbreak was comparable to a catastrophe such as the 2010 Haitian earthquake, which killed 300,000 people.
“The solution is not that complicated, but we need to have political will to do so. Time is running against us. But you need very senior people with high profiles, the kind of people who can coordinate a response to a million people affected by an earthquake,” he said.
His words were echoed by Gabriel Fitzpatrick, who is working at the MSF field hospital in Kailahun, the epicenter of the crisis in Sierra Leone.
“If this Ebola outbreak happened in a Western community, in London, you’d get a few cases and that would be it,” he said. “The main objective here is not to dramatically increase the person’s chance of survival, it’s to contain the spread.”
At least 810 cases of Ebola have been reported in Sierra Leone, and 348 deaths people have died from the virus in the country, according to WHO figures.
Since June, Fitzpatrick has been working in the MSF field hospital, processing patients through three initial stages with a “suspect tent,” a “probably tent” and a “confirmed tent.” Once in the final tent, their chances of coming out alive are slim.
He described one family of nine wiped out after a grandmother contracted the disease on Aug. 4.
Death is swift — usually within four or five days.
“Both Sierra Leone and Liberia were at war 10 years ago and all the infrastructure was destroyed. It’s the worst place on earth to have these epidemics,” De la Vigne said.
Sinead Walsh, who is working on the Sierra Leonean presidential Ebola task force, said the crisis was already causing deeper problems.
More than 1 million people are in quarantine in Kailahun and neighboring Kenema alone, businesses are closing and fears are rising about food shortages, she said.
The disease is having a knock-on effect, with sick people afraid to go to hospital for fear of catching Ebola. Health workers fear deaths from malaria and childbirth could now also escalate.
“We are gone beyond the stage of a health crisis. This is a humanitarian emergency now,” Walsh said. “We need to start working on the secondary crisis.”
Fitzpatrick said the priority was to contain the disease, using local volunteers to find suspected cases and bring patients to hospitals where they can be isolated.
“The second thing is to trace those who we know have been in contact and keep them under observation. We are not doing any contact tracing at the moment,” he said. “It’s not rocket science to do on a large scale across west Africa, but it needs an organizational structure and good leadership.”
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