Wednesday, 14 January 2015

21 days Ebola Isolation Not Allowed To Shop n Farm People Hungry n Angry

According to Skynews, armed soldiers and police stand guard at Sima village just outside Kerry Town to ensure no-one breaches the quarantine.
There is a thin red string that separates the people who could be carrying the deadly Ebola virus.

Nearly 50 people who lived here have already been taken to hospital with Ebola symptoms - 10 have died. Now their relatives, friends and everyone they came in contact with have effectively been put under house arrest for 21 days - the Ebola incubation period.

When we see them it is only day six of their quarantine and tempers are already fraying. They haven't been allowed to shop or farm - so they are hungry and angry.

An armed guard by the red string that divides suspected Ebola victims

An argument breaks out as some of the younger men behind the string barrier complain about being ignored.

"They haven't let us out for six days and if we complain they beat and shove us," one shouts to us. "We all feel fine."

As we are there, British aid arrives. There are huge bundles of food and provisions, including a water carrier, provided by Plan International but it's piled up in lines just beyond the red string as the distributors try to match names on their lists with the hoards of people behind the barrier.

After some delay, they begin handing it out to the visibly grateful people.

This community is just a few miles away from the Ebola unit in Kerry Town where the Scottish nurse Pauline Cafferkey worked and where she may have contracted the virus. Nurse Cafferkey is recovering in hospital thousands of miles away in London.

Teacher Moses Bangura tells Sky News: "Every day people are dying, my sister, my friends, even my two-year-old."
Twelve members of his family have died from the disease.

The next few weeks will be tortuous for this community as they wait to find out whether they too are going to succumb to Ebola.

The scale of this scourge is evident at the Kingtom burial site - run by the Irish charity Concern. They dig 50 graves a day and still often can't keep up with the demand. By the end of the day, all the graves will be filled.

Trevor Jessome from Concern says he's only been in Sierra Leone for two weeks. He points to rows and rows of graves.
"These burials here have all been done in the last two weeks," he says. "We average about 50 a day."

They can't clear this former dump quickly enough to cope with the dead. Unsafe burials of Ebola victims are believed to be responsible for up to 70% of new infections - so now every death is treated like an Ebola death. The authorities don't wait for confirmation.

The burial teams suit up to protect themselves but the danger is never far from their thoughts. 
Every body the authorities retrieve is double wrapped and sealed in thick plastic bags with copious disinfectant used.

Sierra Leone hasn't resorted to cremations like neighbouring Liberia - they are disliked on cultural grounds - and people continue to prepare and bury their loved ones themselves - in secret - to avoid what they see as this indignity.

Alongside the graves, the burial teams disinfect, burn and then bury all their outer layers of protective clothing. They know with all their precautions the risk has been greatly reduced - but they go through this procedure about eight times a day and complacency could mean contamination.


It has taken just eight days for a huge number of tiny graves to build up that are all babies or toddlers. A stick represents a body and some graves have multiple sticks to one mound. The charity estimates there have been about 300 babies buried here in just over a week.

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