AP Photo: Local workers look on as a team or U.S. Navy
engineers prepares the ground for a 25-beds medical facility they are
building next to the airport in Monrovia, Liberia, Saturday Sept. 27,
2014. Six months into the world’s worst-ever Ebola outbreak, and the first
to happen in an unprepared West Africa, the gap between what has been
sent by other countries and private groups and what is desperately needed
is huge. Even as countries try to marshal more resources to close the
gap, those needs threaten to become much greater, and possibly even insurmountable.
(AP Photo/Jerome Delay)© AP
© AP Photo - Local workers look on as a team or U.S. Navy engineers prepares
the ground for a 25-beds medical facility they are building next to the
airport in Monrovia, Liberia, Saturday Sept. 27, 2014. Six months into
the world’s worst-ever Ebola…
From Patricia Doyle
9-28-14
Hello, Jeff - I was absolutely amazed to look at this photo and see our
US Navy personnel with not a stitch of protective gear. They will
be working closely to Ebola infected and WILL get sick. Were they
sent there as sacrifices to vector ebola back to the states? So
many military will likely become ill that the CDC planes won't be used.
They will be brought home and our hospitals will become overwhelmed.
Here is the way that they can kill off old people. When Ebola spreads
from the military, the soldiers and their families and contacts will also
need to be hospitalized. This means that hospitals will have
to triage, i.e. take the young and the younger middle age under 60 and
people my age that need to go to hospitals for Ebola or other illness
will be told 'no room'.
Eventually, those over 70 and the younger seniors age 55 to 70 in poor
health will not be seen by a doctor. Remember, just a few days ago,
the chief writer of Obamacare said that Americans living to be 75 was
'long enough.'
The only way to beat this is to go to another country, like Iceland
or Argentina, or elsewhere in southern South America or New Zealand...places
not involved with ebola overseas. Iceland is probably the best place
as they have 0 visitors from Africa. They also have very good
health care that is mixed with holistic care and natural medicines.
Not too much big pharma there. Many use traditional receipes handed
down from the viking days. They have healing water pools that are reported
to cure skin disease. They also have some sort of silicon stones
that when wet releases some sort of white pasty substance. In the
Winter they use the geothermal pools and rub the stones all over themselves.
They are a healthy people. When I check health map very seldom do
I see any illness outbreaks, animal or human. No mosquitoes there
either.
Jeff, I find it UNCONSCIONABLE to see that our troops are not getting
equipment to protect them. Ebola IS airborne. Too bad the
military believes the CDC lies.
Patty
Ebola Clinics Filled As Liberia Awaits Aid
By Krista Larson
Associated Press
MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) — Fourteen-year-old D.J. Mulbah set off at dawn
with his mother and grandmother in desperate pursuit of a coveted bed
at the Ebola clinic run by Doctors Without Borders in Liberia's capital.
Too weak to stand, they bundled him up into a taxi with his backpack and
a yellow plastic bucket for his vomit. Now he lay on the dirt beside the
worried women awaiting word on how many new patients would enter the clinic
today.
"He's been sick for a week with a runny stomach," says his distressed
mother, wiping the sweat off the boy's brow with her bare hands. "We tried
calling an ambulance days ago but nobody ever came."
Six months after West Africa's first Ebola outbreak emerged, generous
offers of aid are finally pouring in, but beds for the sick are filling
up as fast as clinics can be built. The hundreds of millions of dollars
will also be arriving too late for thousands here as the world's worst-ever
outbreak now has killed more than half its victims.
And even as countries try to marshal more resources to close the gap,
those needs threaten to become much greater, and possibly even insurmountable.
Ambulance sirens blare through standstill traffic here in Monrovia, though
often there is nowhere to take the sick except to so-called "holding centers"
where they await a bed at an Ebola treatment facility.
By 8 a.m. there are a dozen suspected Ebola patients crouching and sitting
on the ground outside the metal padlocked gates of a Monrovia facility
that can only hold 160 patients. Soon a triage nurse approaches, her voice
muffled through a surgical mask covered by a plastic face shield. The
news is good, and D.J. manages a faint smile: The clinic will take the
boy.
His fortune though comes only from the sorrow of others: Only seven of
the 30 beds made available Saturday morning were vacated by survivors.
The rest had died. And the limitations are stark: A sign in a staff tent
inside the outdoor hospital warns: "NO IV lines to be inserted until we
have enough staff."
Dr. Joanne Liu, international president of Doctors Without Borders, urged
world leaders this week to take "immediate action."
"The promised surge has not yet delivered," she said.
Statistics reviewed by The Associated Press and interviews with experts
and those on the scene of one of the worst health disasters in modern
history show how great the needs are and how little the world has done
in response.
— The existing bed capacity for Ebola patients in Liberia, Sierra Leone
and Guinea and Nigeria is about 820, well short of the 2,900 beds that
are currently needed, according to the World Health Organization. Recently
737 beds were pledged by countries. Yet even after the promised treatment
facilities are built, they will still be at least 2,100 beds short.
And if more people get sick than those who recover or die, the shortage
will grow even more pronounced. MSF and other aid workers are distributing
home care kits with gloves and surgical gowns to try and keep those awaiting
hospital beds from infecting relatives while at home, though the distribution
of thousands is still far short in Monrovia, a city of 1.6 million.
— The shortage of health workers is also great. WHO has estimated that
1,000 to 2,000 international health workers are needed in West Africa
and says it is having trouble recruiting enough help. More than 200 health
workers have died as they tried to save lives, complicating recruiting
efforts.
Doctors Without Borders, which has more Ebola clinics than anyone, currently
has 248 foreign aid workers in the region. The U.S. has pledged to train
some 500 local health workers a week, but officials acknowledge that goal
is unrealistic in the current environment.
The African Union has said it will deploy 100 health workers to assist
the West African countries affected by Ebola. The first batch of an AU
Ebola taskforce, totaling 30 people, left for Liberia on Sept. 18. Taskforce
members are expected to arrive in Sierra Leone on Oct. 5 and in Guinea
by the end of October.
Meanwhile, Liberia's chief medical officer placed herself in quarantine
for 21 days after her office assistant died of Ebola. Bernice Dahn, a
deputy health minister who has represented Liberia at regional conferences,
told The Associated Press on Saturday that she did not have any Ebola
symptoms but wanted to ensure she was not infected.
In Liberia's capital, construction workers are building new centers until
nightfall, putting up tin-roof structures with white plastic sheeting
for walls. In two weeks' time — if the work isn't delayed by the rainy
season's torrential downpours — 200 sick people can be treated there.
Dr. Frank Mahoney, co-lead of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control team
in Liberia, said: "We have been working furiously trying to set up treatment
centers but (incoming patients) have been outpacing our ability to set
them up."
Unless the situation is put under control, the outbreak may infect as
many as 1.4 million people by the end of the year and nearly half of those
people could die, the CDC estimated this week. More than 3,000 are currently
believed to have died from Ebola, which is spread through direct contact
with the bodily fluids of the sick.
"If this outbreak continues, the sheer caseload will make it much more
difficult to contain," said Dr. Bruce Aylward, assistant-director general
in charge of emergencies at WHO. "We will need more health workers to
take care of them, more PPE (protective suits), more hospitals, more of
everything."
President Barack Obama has ordered up to 3,000 U.S. military personnel
to West Africa to train health workers and build more than a dozen 100-bed
field hospitals including reserved sections for infected aid workers in
Liberia, the country hardest hit by the disease.
Britain and France have both pledged to build field hospitals in Sierra
Leone and Guinea. China is sending a 59-person lab team to Sierra Leone.
Cuba will send 461 health workers, who will be trained in biosecurity,
and some will go to Liberia and Guinea.
A top priority is sending enough protective equipment, including gloves,
gowns, masks and boots. WHO is shipping about 240,000 protective suits
a month in addition to supplies sent by other agencies. Yet there are
still reports of under-sourced clinics washing and reusing protective
gear that is meant to be worn once and then incinerated.
"We still do have gaps in the supply, which are quite significant," said
Antonio Vigilante, the Deputy Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary-General
in Liberia. "Nobody expected that the requirements of protective gear
would go in the order of millions." Liberia now requires an estimated
1.3 million protective suits, Vigilante said.
One of the world's top makers of the suits, DuPont, says it has more than
doubled production but would not say who has placed orders. Officials
are also looking into whether protective clothing can be locally produced.
"The situation on the ground is just disastrous," said Dr. Heinz Feldmann,
chief of virology at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, who recently returned from Liberia. "The idea of having hundreds
of people in tent structures for Ebola management is unbelievable but
the way this is spreading, we need to find a solution now."
___
AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng reported from London. Sarah DiLorenzo in
Dakar, Senegal and Randall Chase in Dover, Del., contributed to this report.
http://preview.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ebola-clinics-fill-up-as-liberia-awaits-aid/ar-BB675NH |
