The Ebola scare in Liberia has reached such a frenzy that hospitals and medical centers are closing throughout the country, killing those suffering from other ailments because they can’t get the help they need, warned Liberia’s president on Tuesday.
Speaking via satellite to an Ebola conference at Georgetown University, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said that the soaring death rate among non-Ebola patients threatens to reverse the strides made in the nation against killers like AIDS and malaria.
“Lots of people who don’t have Ebola are dying,” she told about 200 attending the morning conference. “They are dying because they don’t have access to hospitals or a doctor center because those facilities are closed.”
In addition, she said that the nation’s economy has been socked as businesses close, rich citizens flee and airlines stop flights. She pleaded with the United States and other countries to lift their warnings on flights to Liberia.
But Sirleaf conceded that many in her own country are terrified of the virus and ill-educated on what causes it and how to deal with it. She mocked those, for example, going to church with hopes of praying away the virus.
She said there are too many “believing in some extraordinary magical way of beating the disease.”
At that conference, a top Food and Drug Administration official said that epidemic has spiraled past how governments typically handle and contain medical disasters.
“The standard tried and true public health measures, they are not working,” said Dr. Luciana Borio, the agency’s acting deputy chief scientist. She said that the crumbling hospital systems in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Liberia are unable to supply basic medicines.
“The limited healthcare infrastructure has made it almost impossible to supply support and care to the patients who need it and by that I mean fluids,” she said.
Borio added that there are two vaccines in early development. “That would be a game changer,” she said.
Georgetown’s Dr. Daniel Lucey, who has traveled to the impacted areas in Africa, added that the crisis is likely to continue for a long time and is likely to reach America.
“We are in for a very long battle with Ebola in West Africa and elsewhere in the world and quite possibly in America,” said Lucey.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
