By Mustapha Kamara jnr
Chief Executive Officer of the National Ebola Response Center (NERC) has revealed that the committee will soon lay off some members of the teams involved in the fight against Ebola in the country.
Rtd Major Alfred Palo Conteh said yesterday at the NERC headquarters in Freetown that they would scale down their surveillance, contact tracing, burial teams and other frontline Ebola workers as the country has started recording decline in the number of Ebola cases. He said the decline in confirmed Ebola cases in the past two weeks indicated that NERC, together with its national and international partners, had made a significant progress in tackling the epidemic which has killed more than 2,700 people in the country, according government figures.
“As of now, over two hundred samples are tested in our laboratories daily, of which only 15% prove to be positive, which means 85% are negative,” Conteh said, adding that some treatment centers across the country were now partially empty with few patients that nurses attend to.
The CEO said they were, in the meantime, working with religious leaders and other groups to sensitise male Ebola survivors to abstain from unprotected sexual activities for three months to protect their partners from contracting the disease. He said male survivors of the disease were not heeding medical advice and had started infecting their partners.
“If you care about your partner, this is the price to pay to ensure that there is no risk of infecting someone you care about with Ebola, “Conteh said.
Meanwhile, the NERC said though Sierra Leone has recorded the highest number of confirmed Ebola cases in West Africa, the country has also recorded the highest number of survivors in the region as “over 2,100 people has been treated and discharged in the country.”
Conteh also said they had increased their security network around the Lungi airport and had further tightened screening methods of everybody arriving at and leaving airport.
“We are currently working with the Ministry of Transport and Aviation and the Airport Authority to see how we can complete the construction of the perimeter fencing around the Airport, “he said.
© Politico 22/01/15
