Liberia Imposes Curfew Over Ebola
Latest reports indicate that Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has imposed a nighttime curfew from today, 20 August, 2014 and quarantined two neighbourhoods in a bid to stem the Ebola virus epidemic in the country.
“Commencing Wednesday, August 20 there will be a curfew from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am (2100 to 0600 GMT),” Sirleaf said in a radio address late Tuesday.
“All entertainment centres are to be closed. All video centres are to be closed at 6:00 pm,” she ordered.
It was gathered that the new quarantine areas include Monrovia’s West Point slum.
Liberia is one of the West African countries battling to curtail the outbreak of the Ebola virus since the disease started to grow in February 2014. Other countries are Guinea, Sierre Leone and Nigeria lately.
It would be recalled that Liberia’s Information Minister, Lewis Brown, had on Monday, 18 August, 2014 announced that the 17 missing Ebola patients, who had fled a medical facility in West Point on Saturday after it was attacked by club-wielding youths, had returned.
The disappearance of the patients had raised fears of a nightmare scenario of people with the highly contagious disease wandering the city, where unburied corpses have been abandoned in the streets.
In Nigeria, meanwhile, a senior doctor who treated the country’s first Ebola patient has died, taking the death toll in Africa’s most populous country to five, Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu confirmed on Tuesday.
According to a recent statement released by the World Health Organization, WHO, the tropical virus had killed 84 people in just three days, a surge that has pushed the overall death toll from the West African outbreak to 1,229.
In the report, Liberia has suffered the biggest toll, 466 deaths from 834 diagnosed cases.
Guinea has recorded 543 cases and 394 deaths, Sierra Leone 848 cases and 365 deaths.
However, Brown said three doctors in Liberia who had been given the experimental US-made drug ZMapp were responding to treatment.
The Nigerian outbreak has been traced to a sole foreigner, Patrick Sawyer, a Liberian-American who died on 25 July in Lagos. All subsequent Nigerian victims have had direct contact with him.
No cure or vaccine is currently available for the disease, which is spread by close contact with body fluids, meaning patients must be isolated.
Source: Legit.ng
