last Ebola-free region of Liberia falls to virus.

MONROVIA (AFP) – Every region of Liberia has
now been hit by Ebola, officials said Friday, as
the World Health Organization warned the fight
against the worst-ever outbreak of the killer
disease would take months.
After seeing people fall to the deadly virus in area
after area, Liberia said two people had
succumbed to the virus in Sinoe province, the last
Ebola-free bastion in a country that has seen the
biggest toll with 624 deaths.
The virus has spread relentlessly through Liberia,
Guinea and Sierra Leone, and Nigeria has also
been affected despite showing some progress in
fighting the epidemic, which has killed 1,427
people since March.
“(Sinoe) was the last area untouched by Ebola,”
George Williams, head of the Health Workers
Association of Liberia, told AFP.
The country has witnessed chaotic scenes in
recent days following a surge in the number of
patients dying of the hemorrhagic fever.
Aid workers said crematoriums in the capital of
Monrovia were struggling to deal with bodies
arriving every day, and earlier this week, violence
erupted in an Ebola quarantine zone in the capital
after soldiers opened fire on protesting crowds.
In a bid to ease the crisis, medical charity
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is working on
nearly quadrupling the capacity of its Ebola centre
in Monrovia.
“Currently we have around 60 patients for a
capacity of 120 beds,” said Henry Gray, an MSF
coordinator.
“And we are making our site bigger. In the next
10 days, we hope to have a location that can
welcome up to 400 patients.”
In neighbouring Nigeria, officials said Friday that
two more people had tested positive for Ebola,
taking the total number of confirmed cases to 14,
including five deaths.
- Flare up -
In a news conference in Monrovia, WHO Assistant
Director-General Dr Keiji Fukuda on Friday warned
efforts to combat the disease would take some
time.
“This is not something to turn around overnight,
it is not going to be easy; we expect several
months of hard work. We expect several months
really struggling with this outbreak,” he said at a
press conference alongside Dr David Nabarro.
Nabarro, a physician appointed by the United
Nations last week to coordinate the global
response to the worst-ever outbreak of the
disease, was in Monrovia as part of a tour of the
region.
Speaking to AFP, he said he was determined to
“ensure that every piece of our apparatus is at its
optimum so it could deal possibly with a flare-up
if that’s necessary”.
Nabarro is also due to visit Freetown, Conakry
and Abuja during the trip, where he is tasked with
revitalising the health sectors of affected
countries.
No cure or vaccine is currently available for the
deadly virus, which is spread by close contact
with body fluids, meaning patients must be
isolated.
However, two American missionaries who
contracted Ebola while treating patients in Liberia
made a full recovery in the United States. The two
were treated with experimental drugs.
- ‘They may die’ -
The failure of west African countries to bring the
epidemic under control has worried its neighbours
and nations further afield.
Senegal on Thursday closed its land border with
Guinea, where 396 people have died to date, in an
attempt to stop the epidemic reaching it.
Gabon, meanwhile, suspended flights and
maritime links from affected countries, and said it
would deliver visas to travellers coming from the
Ebola zone “on a case-by-case basis”.
In a further, urgent effort to contain the epidemic,
Sierra Leone’s parliament passed a law on Friday
that imposes a jail term of up to two years for
anyone concealing an Ebola-infected patient.
Ibrahim Bundu, a senior parliamentary figure, took
the opportunity to blast some of the country’s
allies over their closures of land borders or flight
suspensions.
“We are appalled by… the isolation imposed by
those that we considered our best friends at a
sub-regional, regional and global level,” he said.
Meanwhile, as fears grow that the outbreak will
spread across Africa, the Democratic Republic of
Congo — where Ebola was first identified in 1976
in what was then Zaire — said a fever of
unidentified origin had killed 13 people in the
country’s northwest since August 11.
But a WHO official and MSF said Friday it was
too soon to tell whether a haemorrhagic fever
caused the deaths, and the results of swabs are
due in a week’s time.