At risk of Ebola, Liberia’s top doctor quarantines herself

Reporting from Monrovia, Liberia —  Liberia’s chief medical officer has quarantined herself for three weeks and ordered her entire office to do the same after an assistant died of Ebola.

Dr. Bernice Dahn had no symptoms. But her move to quarantine her office was in line with a government policy on containing the crisis. In crowded, jostling communities of the capital, Monrovia, the government’s 21-day quarantine rule is mostly ignored.

After Dahn’s assistant died, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare stopped working Thursday to allow sprayers to decontaminate the building.

“Of course we made the rule, so I am home for 21 days. I did it on my own. I told my office staff to stay at home for the 21 days. That’s what we need to do,” Dahn told the Associated Press in an interview Saturday.

Liberia has had nearly 2,400 confirmed or probable cases of the Ebola virus, plus more than 1,000 suspected cases. Cases continue to increase exponentially, with 150 reported in the last two days.

Liberia is among three West African countries, along with Sierra Leone and Guinea, that have had more than 3,000 deaths confirmed or suspected to be from Ebola. More than 6,000 people have been infected in the biggest outbreak of the disease in history.

Liberia’s government has struggled to hit the right note in its handling of the unprecedented crisis, which reached the country in March when people arrived from neighboring Guinea seeking treatment in Liberia’s Lofa County.

As late as August, some communities had little information about the virus, as infections spread through poor, crowded communities ill-equipped to combat the disease, many of them lacking running water.

As the government tried to correct its public information course, sending out the message that Ebola was a killer disease with no cure, many sick people were so terrified they evaded health facilities, which came to be seen as death traps from which patients never emerged alive. As people stayed at home, cared for by loved ones who buried them in secret, the disease rapidly spread, leading to a disastrous shortage of treatment beds.

Public messages warning the public to stay away from Ebola patients have led to acute stigmatization of not only the sick, but healthcare workers and survivors of the disease.

At one point, the government enforced a quarantine, imposed overnight without warning, on a sprawling slum district in Monrovia. Sierra Leone imposed a three-day, 24-hour curfew for the entire population except health workers, police and the military.

The crisis has exposed the ramshackle state of the health systems in the three countries and caused an almost total collapse in treatment for unrelated illnesses, accidents and birth complications, leading to a hidden toll in deaths from preventable diseases such as malaria.

It also has taken a terrible toll on healthcare workers.

There have been 375 health workers infected, of whom 211 have died, including 89 dead in Liberia and 82 in Sierra Leone.

“Exposure of healthcare workers to [the Ebola virus] continues to be an alarming feature of this outbreak,” the World Health Organization said.

There have been instances of panic-stricken nurses and doctors fleeing their posts, although many have since returned. The country’s largest hospital, the John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Monrovia, closed temporarily in July after the deaths of health workers and again this month after nurses called a work stoppage, protesting the lack of proper protective gear to handle the Ebola crisis.

Many Liberians are angry about the government’s failure to warn them of the dangers quickly enough, its failure to prevent the spread of the disease from neighboring countries and its poor handling of the crisis since.

“We were let down, because the information didn’t circulate on time,” said Massa Yakima, 58, who lost 13 members of her family to the disease, most of them children.

“If a person died, the body remained for four days, five days, seven days. The response was poor, really poor,” said Augustine Fredericks of the community group Women and Children Advocacy.

Scientists believe Ebola is not transmitted by people until they exhibit symptoms, which normally appear between two and 21 days of infection.

The virus has no cure, but early treatment of symptoms and fluids are believed to improve the chances of survival.

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