By Septimus Senessie in Kono
The International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC) has commissioned and started admitting Ebola patients into its just completed 48-bed capacity Ebola Treatment Centre at Dorma Town in the Gbense chiefdom, Kono District.
Nine patients have been admitted into the center after their blood samples were tested at theKenema District Ebola Laboratory.
The construction of the treatment facility comes as Kono continues to record increased new cases of the Ebola virus disease, while its sister districts in the eastern region - Kailahun and Kenema – struggle to sustain zero infection rates. The two districts used to be the epicenter of the epidemic which has claimed over 2,700 lives in the whole country. Between Kailahun and Kenema, a total of 1,063 people were infected.
Until recently, Kono was thought to be recording only a handful of cases before a joint UN-government investigation revealed a worsened situation in December. Today its cases stand at 226, according to the National Ebola Response Center figures.
Until now, Ebola infected people in that district were taken to Kenema for treatment.
RanveigTveitne, IFRC’steam leader in the Kono district, said the commissioning of the center was a dream come true and a fulfillment of a commitment by her organisation last December that within three weeks Kono district would cease to take its Ebola patients to Kenema.
Speaking to Politico in an exclusive interview, she says the three hours’ drive through a poor road network “deteriorated and worsened the patients’ condition”.
It now takes at most 10 minutes’ drive to reach the new centre, she says, adding that the centre is purely being managed and run by Red Cross personnel. The opening of the center will allow the government hospital to concentrate on patients with other ailments which have gone largely neglected, she says.
Asked whether she was seeing Ebola out of Sierra Leone at the end of the next eleven months of 2015, Madam Tveitne declined to comments, saying her organisation did not have the mandates to give a time line as to when the Ebola virus would be eradicated in country. But she later told Politico that she foresaw her organisation fighting Ebola in the district for the next five to six months of 2015.
She assured the safety of the Dorma community where the centre is situated.
The Town Chief of Dorma Community, Chief Sahr Kemoh, said that at the initial stage when he was contacted by stakeholders in the district about the establishment of a treatment centre in his community, his people felt apprehensive. He said they’d feared the virus could spread in their community as a result.
Chief Kemoh said the precautionary measures he saw the medics practice at the centre had “assured me and my people that the virus will not spread so easily into the community from the centre.”
Meanwhile, another health care provider in the district, Partners In Health (PIH), is set to commission its Mobile Ebola Laboratory shortly, according to the organisation. The lab is situated just about two hundred metres from the treatment centre at Dorma Town.
© Politico 16/01/15
