With an international donors' conference happening today in London to raise funds for fight Ebola in Sierra Leone, a damning report by Save The Children says five Sierra Leoneans contract Ebola every hour.
The organisation warns that the “demand for treatment beds and nurses to halt the rapid spread of Ebola across Sierra Leone is far outstripping supply”.
The report, released last night, says “an estimated 765 new cases were reported last week – a rate of five every hour - while there are only 327 beds in the country”. It says the critical shortage comes as “untold numbers of children are dying anonymously at home or in the streets, meaning the scale of the problem is massively unreported”.
It says the disease is spreading “at a terrifying rate” across the country, “with the number of new cases being recorded doubling every few weeks”.
It warns that at the current rate “10 people every hour will be infected with Ebola in the country before the end of October. Even as health authorities get on top of the outbreak in one area, it breaks out in another”.
The report says that even with the 700 new beds pledged by Britain people will continue to die at home, infecting their families and wider community “unless the international community radically steps up its response”.
Save the Children’s country director in Sierra Leone, Rob MacGillivray, is quoted as saying: “We are facing the frightening prospect of an epidemic which is spreading like wildfire across Sierra Leone, with the number of new cases doubling every three weeks. Children, more than anyone, are suffering painful, anonymous and undignified deaths at home. It’s very difficult at this stage to even give accurate figures on the number of children who are dying from Ebola, as monitoring systems cannot keep pace with the outbreak.”
The organisation is working with the British Department for International Development (DFID) and its Ministry of Defence to set up a 100-bed treatment centre and support an Interim Care Centre in Kailahun for children “who have lost their families to Ebola” and has pledged to raise and spend $70m to stop the spread of the disease across the region, treat more patients and support children who have lost their parents.
“The UK government has taken the lead on supporting Sierra Leone to tackle this crisis, but it cannot act alone. The scale of the Ebola epidemic is devastating and growing every day, with five people infected every hour in Sierra Leone last week. We need a coordinated international response that ensures treatment centres are built and staffed immediately,” Save the Children CEO, Justin Forsyth says.
“This is not only an immediate humanitarian threat, but risks completely undoing the hard work which has been done to build up the fragile health systems in Sierra Leone and Liberia after the devastating wars of the past few decades,” he says.
(C) Politico 02/10/14
