Anthony Banbury, head of the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER), visited Sierra Leone on Monday, 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,” the UN News Center reported.
Continuing his tour through the front lines of the crisis, Banbury 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 mobilization – what we have seen in Kenema is a big drop in the case loads.”
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.
A troubling consequence of the shortage of sickbeds and treatment facilities, said Banbury, is that in some communities, the locals are starting to use put patients into schools.
“There's no testing of the patients there, so we don't know who actually has Ebola and who doesn't – it's a risk to the patients who don't have it, it's a risk to the local community, the people who are trying to care for them.”
“We need proper facilities, including community care facilities, in order to get this disease under control, so a big, big concern now is we don't have enough partners on the ground,” he declared.
Turning to a more positive aspect of the trip, Banbury said that meeting survivors of Ebola in Kenema was “one of the happiest moments that I've had since I started this job more than a month ago”. He said it appeared that most of the people were in their 30s and 40s, “and it's just so inspiring…knowing that people can survive getting this disease, especially if they get early treatment.”