Crowds attack Ebola facility, health workers in Guinea

[Buster's Uncle]

Crowds attack Ebola facility, health workers in Guinea
Reuters  4 hours ago



A billboard with a message about Ebola is seen on a street in Conakry, Guinea October 26, 2014. The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, is traveling to Guinea on Sunday and will also visit Liberia and Sierra Leone, making the trip despite calls by some U.S. lawmakers for a travel ban on the three West African countries worst-affected by Ebola. REUTERS/Michelle Nichols



CONAKRY (Reuters) - Crowds destroyed an Ebola facility and attacked health workers in central Guinea on rumours that the Red Cross was planning to disinfect a school, a government spokesman said on Saturday.

Red Cross teams in Guinea have been attacked on average 10 times a month over the past year, the organisation said this week, warning that the violence was hampering efforts to contain the disease.

During the incident on Friday in the town of Faranah, around 400 km (250 miles) east of the capital Conakry, angry residents attacked an Ebola transit centre and set ablaze a vehicle belonging to medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres.

A Red Cross burial team was also targeted and forced to flee, said Fodé Tass Sylla, spokesman for the government campaign against the disease.

"All this agitation aims to discourage our partners and to give the virus the upper hand. We won't accept that," he said. "Everyone must understand that the fight we are leading requires the engagement of all citizens."

The number of new cases in Guinea nearly doubled last week to 64, according to World Health Organization data, jeopardising a government plan to get to zero new cases by early March.

Over 2,000 people have died out of a total of around 3,000 cases of Ebola in Guinea, which along with Sierra Leone and Liberia is one of the three countries hardest hit by the worst epidemic of the disease on record.


http://news.yahoo.com/crowds-attack-ebola-facility-health-workers-guinea-141202169.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Sierra Leone locks down part of capital after spike in Ebola cases
Reuters  February 13, 2015 12:59 PM



A health worker in protective gear walks inside a Red Cross facility in the town of Koidu, Kono district in Eastern Sierra Leone in this file photo taken on December 19, 2014. REUTERS/Baz Ratner



DAKAR (Reuters) - Sierra Leone has locked down a neighborhood in the capital Freetown following a spike in Ebola cases, in a setback for the country hardest-hit by the virus, an official in the government response team said on Friday.

Health workers were deploying to carry out house-to-house searches in Aberdeen, a district on the tip of the Freetown peninsula where dense slums lie a stone's throw away from upscale restaurants and hotels popular with foreigners.

"There was a sudden spike in the number of cases. It's effectively a quarantine there which would typically last 21 days," said OB Sisay, director of the situation room in the National Ebola Response Centre.

The center's most recent data showed six new confirmed cases of Ebola in Aberdeen on Wednesday.

He estimated there were between 1,200 and 2,000 people in Aberdeen who had potentially come into contact with individuals infected with the disease.

(Writing by Emma Farge; Editing by Joe Bavier)


http://news.yahoo.com/sierra-leone-locks-down-part-capital-spike-ebola-175922339.html