Prevention Is The Only Answer To Ebola

The situation in Liberia and Sierra Leone, as regards Ebola, is dire. Groups of extremely brave and humane individuals are doing their best to bring the disease under control. But they are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people who are infected on a daily basis, and the lack of safe, hospital facilities with which to nurse them back to recovery. The worst part of it all is that many of the brave, dedicated people fighting against the disease are themselves being killed by it.

In the circumstances, it cannot be stressed enough that the only way to avoid Ebola is to PREVENT it from reaching our shores in the first place. Those charged with screening arrivals – at our international airport, at our seaports, and at our land borders – must do so with utmost dedication and efficiency. They should be always polite and show absolutely no signs of hysteria, of course, because hysterical people are incapable of doing the work for which they have been trained. By being calm and efficient, our gate-keepers will help, as far as possible, to save themselves and their fellow countrymen from this diabolical disease.

In the mean time, we should do everything possible to prepare for the unexpected. Our health authorities must continually run workshops for their personnel, at which every variation of the “What if”scenario is put to the test. Constant supervision should be carried out to ensure that s the lessons taught at workshop level are strictly implemented. In saying this, I mean no offence: I am not suggesting for one second that such measures are not already being enforced. I merely want to reinforce the crucial message that the only certain way for a country to survive the Ebola pandemic is to avoid it.

Crossing my fingers, I want to acknowledge that the fact that so far, we have not heard anything untoward about our health authorities rising to the task – despite the nefarious work of scaremongers, some of whom have sought to spread panic on the Internet by reporting alleged lapses in our surveillance systems – means that our health authorities are doing quite well, despite the parlous state of our health-care system.

(One report I read on the Internet claimed that some people who had returned from Sierra Leone, had not been screened at the airport before being allowed to go into town. There was no hard evidence in the story: no date of arrival; no names of the people who had returned; where they went to and what could have made them insane enough not to reveal where they coming from, since everyone knows that Sierra Leone is one of the countries suffering in the worst manner from Ebola.

Another mischievous report claimed that some “international students” were leaving Ghana's shores for fear of Ebola. Here again, there were no hard facts: the so-called journalists who filed the report did not take care, knowing how emotive the subject is, to tell us who these students were; how long they had been studying in Ghana; what they had been studying; where they had stayed; and where they were going to that was supposedly safer than Ghana. Was their alleged departure possibly related to the long vac? These are simple queries that news editors and sub-editors should be able to ask before granting a story authenticity. But so poor is journalistic practice in Ghana these days that ''reporters” are virtually allowed to become their own sub-editors!

I urge the managements of our media – especially those of the raucous radio stations – to organise workshops for their so-called journalists , at which they would be educated on how to report situations that can result in mass panic – events relating to war, civil unrest and epidemics. This is no time for any idiot to be allowed to get behind a microphone and talk about what was said at an unstated time, unnamed “somewhere”, by “nameless persons”, about unspecified potential threats to the populace relating to Ebola. The prevalent morbid interest in Ebola but must not be allowed to be exploited for commercial gain by radio stations or scandal sheets posing as newspapers.

I hope everyone will read and carefully reflect on the article below, which describes how the Ebola calamity is affecting Liberia. I have had occasion to praise Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) for the amazing work it is doing in Liberia and Sierra Leone. MSF has fearlessly told the governments of the world that they are failing humanity in the fight against Ebola. It has also told them whatthey can do immediately; and it has pulled no punches in vividly describing the situation on the ground to the world.

Now, in the London Observer newspaper, a front-line worker of MSN has gone public to bare his or her feelings, about what MSF staff are going through in Liberia. Entitled “In decades of humanitarian work, I've never seen suffering like this”, the article reveals that:

QUOTE: I wake up each morning – if I have managed to sleep – wondering if this is really happening, or if it is a horror movie. In decades of humanitarian work, I have never witnessed such relentless suffering of fellow human beings or felt so completely paralysed and utterly overwhelmed at our inability to provide anything but the most basic, and sometimes less than adequate, care.

I am supervising the suspect tent, [where suspected cases are taken to await the results of tests they have undergone] which has room for 25 patients who are likely to have Ebola – 80-90% of those we test [do] have the virus....Sometimes people have arrived too late and die shortly after arriving.

In one afternoon last week I watched five seemingly fit, healthy, young men die. I gave the first a bottle of oral rehydration solution and came back with another for the second. In the half a minute or so in which I had been away, the first man died, his bottle of water spilt across the floor. The four others followed in quick succession.

We sometimes have to hold back tears but try to offer patients all the comfort that we can – especially if they are in their last moments. I cannot spend as much time as I would like with each of them, due to the intense heat [within] the personal protective equipment [I wear] and the sheer number of patients.

My colleagues in logistics are doing a fantastic job of building new extensions and hopefully, in the next week, we will increase our capacity further still. In the meantime, we are only open to admit patients for a couple of hours each day before all our beds are full again. ...

Unfortunately, people die before they even reach our centre. It is a difficult and dangerous procedure to remove a body from a vehicle and the team often has to do this many times a day. ....

Each day this week, patients have recovered – in the early stages there were no survivors whatsoever. Yesterday, seven people went home, including a young man who had painted the inside of one of our tents red when he arrived because he was bleeding so profusely. Our team had thought he had no hope of survival....

I believe MSF is doing a fantastic job, but we are only able to care for a minority of the people in Monrovia who have Ebola. We also work in the north of the country, but every county [in Liberia] is now reporting cases and we have absolutely no capacity to respond.

It is extremely sad to see the indifference of the international community with regards to this epidemic.

It is great to see an added interest and investment in research for vaccines, but we urgently need experts who are physically present and more structures on the ground here in west Africa, where the situation continues to be catastrophic.

(The author is an aid worker for Médecins Sans Frontières who wished to remain anonymous) UNQUOTE

I hereby humbly call on President Barack Obama to put his words into practice and send the military units he has promised, as quickly as possible; I also urge the British Government to follow suit; and I remind the leaders of Russia, France, Germany, China, the Scandinavian countries and all other countries capable of helping, that we are yet to hear from them. They should all follow Cuba's selfless example and lend Africa a hand urgently.

On reading the Observer article quoted above, one personwrote to the paper:

QUIOTE: We have money to spend on our innumerable and persistent warring, but nothing on such truly existential problems as plagues and environmental degradation. Homo sapiens is Latin for 'rational man'. I think humans have misnamed themselves, for we seem completely irrational. UNQUOTE

Doesn't that say it all?