Armed men attacked an Ebola isolation ward in the Liberian capital Monrovia overnight, prompting 29 patients to flee the facility, witnesses said Sunday.
“They broke down the doors and looted the place. The patients all fled,” said Rebecca Wesseh, who witnessed the attack and whose report was confirmed by residents and the head of Health Workers Association of Liberian, George Williams.
The attack comes just one day after a report of a crowd of several hundred local residents, chanting, ‘No Ebola in West Point,’ drove away a burial team and their police escort that had come to collect the bodies of suspected Ebola victims in a slum in the capital, Reuters reports. The mob then forced open an Ebola isolation ward and took several patients out, many saying that the Ebola epidemic is a hoax.
The isolation center, a closed primary school originally built by USAID, was being used by the Liberian health ministry to temporarily isolate people suspected of carrying the virus, Reuters reports. Some 10 patients had “escaped” the building the night before, according to a nurse, as the center had no medicine to treat them.
While the armed attack is likely the most brazen attack on health workers trying to contain the deadly outbreak, it is far from the first in the region worst-hit by it.
The Ebola outbreak that has killed more than 1,100 people in West Africa could last another six months, the Doctors Without Borders charity group said Friday. One aid worker acknowledged that the true death toll is still unknown.
New figures released by the World Health Organization showed that Liberia has recorded more Ebola deaths – 413 – than any of the other affected countries.
Tarnue Karbbar, who works for the aid group Plan International in northern Liberia, said response teams simply aren’t able to document all the erupting Ebola cases. Many of the sick are still being hidden at home by their relatives, who are too fearful of going to an Ebola treatment center.
There is no cure or licensed treatment for Ebola and patients often die gruesome deaths with external bleeding from their mouths, eyes or ears. The killer virus is transmitted through bodily fluids like blood, sweat, urine and diarrhea. A handful of people have received an experimental drug whose effectiveness is unknown.
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