Deaths in West Africa pass
2,600 as Sierra Leone prepares for unprecedented three-day lockdown to contain
disease.
More than 700 more Ebola
cases have emerged in West Africa in the past week week, a statistic that
showed the outbreak was rapidly accelerating, the World Health Organisation has
said.
The UN health agency said on
Thursday that more than 5,300 people have now contracted the virus, and that
the latest statistics showed that just under half of these cases were recorded
in the last three weeks.
Just three weeks ago the
number of new cases was around 500 for a one-week period.
The death toll also passed
2,600 people, an increase of roughly 200 from the last estimate, WHO said.
Later on Thursday, the UN
Security Council declared the outbreak a "threat to
international peace and security" and called on all states to provide
urgent resources and assistance to help tackle the crisis.
The alarm came as Sierra
Leone readied for an unprecedented three-day nationwide lockdown to
contain the spread of the Ebola in a controversial move which experts
claimed could worsen the epidemic.
The population of six million
will be confined to their homes from midnight on Thursday as almost 30,000
volunteers go door-to-door uncovering patients and bodies hidden in people's
homes.
"Rain or shine, the
shutdown exercise is going to go ahead. During the three days ... the job is
going to get done," said Steven Gaojia, head of the government's emergency
operation centre.
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hit by Ebola travel ban
The worst-ever outbreak of
Ebola has claimed more than 500 lives in Sierra Leone, one of three countries
at the epicentre of the epidemic.
"Ose to Ose Ebola
Tok" - "house-to-house Ebola talk" in the widely-spoken Krio
language - will see more than 7,000 volunteer teams of four visiting the
country's 1.5 million homes.
They will hand out bars of
soap and information on how to prevent infection, as well as setting up
"neighbourhood watch"-style community Ebola surveillance teams.
Soldiers to enforce
The government has said the
teams will not enter people's homes and are not tasked with collecting patients
or bodies, but will call emergency services or burial teams "if by chance
the teams happen to bump into such situations".
Extra beds have been set up
at schools and hospitals across the country, including 200 around Freetown,
with the government projecting a 15 to 20 percent upsurge of cases as new
patients are discovered.
Community activists and civil
society leaders have been recruited to help thousands of police and soldiers
enforce the curfew.
Experts warned however that
coercive measures to stem the epidemic, such as confining people to their
homes, could backfire badly and would be extremely hard to implement
effectively.
Jean-Herve Bradol, a former
director of Doctors without Borders (MSF), said the goal seemed "highly
unrealistic".
In separate development, the
medical charity MSF on Thursday criticised the delay in repatriating a foreign health
worker infected with Ebola in Africa after it took two days to fly out the
infected French volunteer from Liberia.
"It's just too long when
you see that it takes 42 hours from the moment when a case is detected to when
they are repatriated," Brice de la Vigne, MSF operations director, said.
MSF is the leading
organisation fighting Ebola, with more than 2,000 staff members working across
West Africa. Its president, Joanne Liu, had previously warned that infection
among its own staff could exacerbate the outbreak by spreading it further among
the healthy.
The UN Security Council will
convene on Thursday to decide if Ebola is deemed a global threat.
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