Witnessing yet again the challenging dynamics of the Ebola outbreak unfolding in West Africa, the United Nations envoy coordinating the global response visited Sierra Leone, where he reported efforts to halt the virus in former hotspot, Kenema, are starting to pay off, while some 200 kilometres away, Port Loko is now "getting slammed".
Continuing his tour through the front lines of the crisis, Anthony Banbury, head of the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER), stopped in Kenema, Sierra Leone's third largest city, where he said the strategy to defeat the disease is having some success.
"The first place I heard about Ebola was in Kenema and all the terrible things happening there – health care workers getting sick, large numbers of people getting the disease," yet today, he was pleased to see that Kenema is making progress.
"Once again, all the elements of a successful strategy to defeat Ebola [are] in place and having an effect – the safe burials, the case management and treatment facilities, the community mobilisation – what we have seen in Kenema is a big drop in the case loads." Mr. Banbury said that there is an excellent International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) treatment facility in Kenema where a large number of beds were empty "because we're really seeing the caseload drop." That facility is receiving patients from outside Kenema, from as afar away as Freetown, he added.
"So it's again the same lesson that we saw in Gueckedou in Guinea – the strategy is working, we just need to expand it wherever we can," he said referring to his visit yesterday to neighbouring Guinea, which, along with Liberia, is also among the countries most-affected by the current Ebola outbreak.
The need to expand the strategy became starkly clear during Mr. Banbury's next stop, in Port Loko, "which is getting hit really hard now, it's just getting slammed." He said that there are more cases coming in every day. The capacity of the holding centres is absolutely full, with no beds to spare.
"There's a holding centre there with a capacity of 64, they have over 100 patients in it now. That's dangerous to the health care staff. And we just need to get more resources into Port Loko now," he said.