‘Entire
villages disappeared’: Ebola deaths in Sierra Leone ‘underreported’
RT.
1
November, 2014
Ebola’s
toll on Sierra Leone is much greater than previously thought, with
entire villages killed off by the virus. This means up to 20,000
people could have succumbed to the disease by now, a senior
coordinator for Doctors Without Borders (MSF) believes.
According
to Rony Zachariah, coordinator of operational research for MSF, the
Ebola impact on Sierra Leone is in fact “under-reported,”
AFP quotes.
“The
situation is catastrophic. There are several villages and communities
that have been basically wiped out. In one of the villages I went to,
there were 40 inhabitants and 39 died,”
Zachariah told the agency. “Whole communities have
disappeared but many of them are not in the statistics. The situation
on the ground is actually much worse.”
The
latest figures from the World Health Organization (WHO) put the total
number of dead at 4,951 out of 13,567 recorded cases.
But
the real total could be up to 20,000 people dead, Zachariah argues.
“The WHO says there is a correction factor of 2.5, so maybe it is
2.5 times higher and maybe that is not far from the truth. It could
be 10,000, 15,000 or 20,000.”
Zachariah
also highlighted the shortage of healthcare workers in the country.
“You
have one nurse for 10,000 people and then you lose 10, 11, 12 nurses.
How is the health system going to work?”
he said.
Even
at this point, the pace of dealing with Ebola is slow, he added. “We
might get a vaccine and a treatment...but even now we need to go much
faster because the clock is ticking...We want action now.”
Meanwhile,
the latest cases of Ebola in Spain and the US have sparked fears of
an even bigger outbreak, prompting Canada to step up its border
security so as to limit the risk of infection spreading into the
country.
The
federal government announced on Friday it is suspending the
processing of visa applications for residents and nationals who have
been in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone in the last three months.
The same goes for permanent residence applications.
The
Spanish government has expressed grave concern over the threat of
terrorists using Ebola as a biological weapon against the West.
Spain’s
state secretary for security, Francisco Martinez, addressed the
parliament, discussing the possibility of extremists connected to the
Islamic State (IS, previously ISIS) using Ebola as a weapon against
the West.
There
are “many examples”
of online terrorist chat logs discussing the use of biological
warfare against the West, Spain’s RTVE public broadcasting
corporation reported
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