AFRICA/SIERRA LEONE - "There is a high level of alert against Ebola, villages in quarantine, hunger and malnutrition": the Director of CUAMM has just returned from the Country

Thursday, 11 September 2014

Padova (Agenzia Fides) - In Sierra Leone Ebola continues to claim victims. Don Dante Carraro, Director of the NGO Doctors with Africa CUAMM has just returned from the African Country, where there are volunteers of the NGO.
He told Fides Agency: "I arrived in Freetown, where besides controlling your passport and entry permit they also control if you have fever, and they do it with a sort of 'laser gun' aimed at the temple - said the director of CUAMM -. In the morning we moved to Pujehun, where we are working, a rural district in the South of the Country, one of the most populous and widespread districts in the Country, with more than 300 thousand people. In the compound of the hospital there is the District Health Management Team (DHMT). So far there have been 9 deaths due to Ebola, almost all from Zimmi, a town across the river Moe. Although it is not officially in quarantine, in practice it is closed, the population is not allowed to move from one place to another and it is impossible to reach the area by road. There is desperate need of food".
"In Pujehun there is a lack of boots, coveralls, goggles, masks, chlorine; training of personnel, contact tracers (those who study how and where contacts are occurred and move into the community to identify suspect cases), isolation units with running water and electricity and even burial teams (groups of 8 persons responsible for the proper burial of the bodies). We then moved to the hospital in Kenema, in the district next to ours, the heart of the epidemic – continues to Don Dante -. We enter the building which is completely empty except patients with Ebola. It is a concentration camp: guards in white coveralls, strict rules, checkpoints everywhere. People are afraid and we are too! Is seems you are in front of an invisible, impalpable, yet monstrous and deadly 'beast'. So far, in Kenema alone, there have been 158 deaths, of whom 27 doctors and nurses. Only in the last 3 days 4 laboratory technicians lost their lives".
"We ended the day by accompanying the pick-up of the hospital up to a field used as a cemetery: other three bodies buried. On the last day we were in Zimmi, a town of 10,000 inhabitants. The inhabitants are abandoned because there is no isolation unit, and buried after death in a mass grave. We then visited the school where there are 46 mothers, children and some male adults, quarantined, isolated from the community, because there is fear that the infection may spread" concludes Don Dante. (AP) (Agenzia Fides 11/09/2014)


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