Hot News: Aid urgently needed for deadly Ebola outbreak: Canadian doctor

The response to West Africa's Ebola outbreak has been 'suboptimal,' says a Canadian doctor who recently returned from Guinea, adding more outside aid is urgently needed to help treat the fast-spreading and virulent disease.

The World Health Organization says the outbreak is the largest ever recorded - more than 670 people in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone have died since it began this year. There is no cure and Ebola kills 90% of those it infects, depending on the strain; the current outbreak is killing about 70%.

Symptoms include fever, severe weakness and muscle pain and headache, which leads to vomiting and diarrhea.

'On the clinical side, the disease is not exactly what we've seen in the movies. It's not a spectacular disease. Most patients have very common symptoms that you can relate to,' said Dr. Marc Forget, 45, a general practitioner from Montreal who spent more than six weeks in the field.

'There is nothing specific to Ebola and that's what makes it even more difficult to fight because people don't think they have Ebola at first. Even when Ebola strikes, they think it's probably just malaria and then they get sicker and sicker.'

Dr. Forget was working in Gueckedou, a forest region on the borders of Liberia and Sierra Leone, part of a mission organized by Médecins Sans Frontières.

Although he has 12 years experience working for the MSF, including stints in South Sudan and Haiti, this was his first encounter with Ebola, trying to ensure the disease didn't spread to relatives of infected patients.

'A lot of the work was explaining what we're doing ... explaining why we isolated [family members] and everything,' said Dr. Forget.

Many people were in denial about the disease and blamed MSF workers for it.

'[They] associated the coming of NGOs and expats and WHO workers with the Ebola outbreak,' he said. 'They kind of made the conclusion that we brought [Ebola].'

The disease is spreads by close contact with the bodily fluids of the infected, even after death. But in Guinea, the need to isolate patients directly conflicts with cultural beliefs.

Locals believe if the infected people aren't properly looked after, they might come back as ghosts, haunting those who neglected them.

Another local tradition is for families to wash and bury their bodies of their loved ones themselves, which significantly increases the risk of catching Ebola.

After family members, health workers are usually the first to contract a disease during an epidemic, says Dr. Forget. Two American aid workers have tested positive for Ebola while working at a hospital in Liberia and a well-known Liberian doctor has died.

'You need to be worried because it's a deadly disease, but if you follow all the guidelines and protocols - all the procedures that we have to put the gear on, to remove the gear, you're sprayed on and on every step you do - it doesn't reduce the risk to zero but very close to that,' said Dr. Forget, comparing the procedures to military-like standards.

'Any breach in that protocol will create a risk.'

But he adds he felt felt secure in Guinea.

'I was sick at one point and I had a stomach upset. I started thinking, of course, 'Oh my god, did I catch it?' But what reassured me was that I had followed all the protocols and the procedures so anxiously, so obsessively, that I knew that it was probably just something else and it was,' he said.

'On the clinical side, the disease is not exactly what we've seen in the movies. It's not a spectacular disease'

As Ebola continues to spread, Dr. Forget says more foreign healthcare staff and treatment centres are urgently needed in the regions most affected.

Because there is no cure, doctors can only rely on antibiotics to contain the disease and prevent other simultaneous infections. In a region where people are suspicious of foreign medical practices is strong, public education is key.

'If you have Ebola, the outreach team will go to your village and will spray the house so we can decontaminate everything. After one week, everybody that you were in contact with that you transmitted the virus to will start being sick themselves and they make the association with spraying of the house and spreading of the disease,' said Dr. Forget.

'That will bring a mistrust that is very hard to defeat.'

Despite the risk, the physician expects to return to the region.

'Am I going to go for an Ebola mission? Probably,' he said. 'I'm a die-hard MSF, I guess.'

Post By http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/07/28/aid-urgently-needed-for-deadly-ebola-outbreak-canadian-doctor/