Ebola quarantine in Liberia threatened by lack of food

Dozens of people quarantined for Ebola monitoring in western Liberia are threatening to break out of isolation because they have no food, the West African nation's state radio reported Thursday.

Forty-three people were put in quarantine after four people died of Ebola in Jenewonda, a town in an impoverished corner of Grand Cape Mount County near the Sierra Leone border, the Liberia Broadcasting System said.

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It quoted those quarantined as saying that the UN World Food Program apparently has stopped providing food to people affected by Ebola in the area. But a World Food Program spokesman said they hadn't been distributing food there.

"WFP in Liberia heard about this community being isolated only two days ago via the radio and staff immediately began organizing a mission to bring food to the quarantined people," said spokesman Alexis Masciarelli in an email to The Associated Press. "We are moving as fast as we can."

There are no trucks in Grand Cape Mount County so food needs to be driven in from Monrovia, he said, adding they will verify reports with authorities and look into what is going on.

"We need to keep working with government and partners to identify the communities in need as quickly as possible," he said.

Liberia is the hardest hit of three West African nations being ravaged by Ebola. The latest figures published Wednesday by the UN's World Health Organization show the country has at least 4,665 infected people and 2,705 have died there. WHO says there probably are more ill people and deaths but the numbers are under-reported.

The public is now afraid of the hospital and nobody is coming.- Abdulai Sie Sawaneh

Overall, the WHO says the disease has killed 4,877 people and infected 9,936, almost all in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

The fear of Ebola in Guinea has kept patients and health workers, including doctors, from a hospital that is serving as an Ebola centre in the capital, Conakry.

"People are talking about Ebola all over here, they say `If you come here at the hospital you will get this and that,"' said Abdulai Sie Sawaneh a merchant living and working at the Donka hospital compound. "The public is now afraid of the hospital and nobody is coming."

Earlier this month, President Alpha Conde called on retired doctors to join the fight against Ebola.

In Freetown, the Sierra Leone capital, the head of the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response, Anthony Banbury, told a news conference Thursday that "We are working to put this fire under control."

They would start by trying to isolate at least 70 per cent of cases, he said. The UN plan to stop transmission also includes safely burying at least 70 percent of victims by Dec. 1, and to have 100 per cent of cases isolated and all the dead safely buried by Jan. 1.

An internal UN World Health Organization report obtained by The Associated Press blames a series of blunders for allowing the epidemic to spiral out of control, notably the organization's own "failure to see that conditions for explosive spread were present right at the start."

Banbury said, "The world has never seen a serious, grave and complex crisis of this nature where people are dying every day with unsafe burial practices."

Among needs he identified were efficient contact tracing, safe burials, social mobilization and involvement of communities, bringing treatment centres closer to communities and ensuring that the centres are supported by robust logistics and training.

"A lot of work needs to be done and no one country can do it alone," he said.

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