One of Liberia's most high-profile doctors has died of Ebola, a government official said on Sunday , highlighting the risks facing health workers trying to combat the deadly disease.
Dr Samuel Brisbane is the first Liberian doctor to die in an outbreak the World Health Organisation says has killed 129 people in the west African nation. A Ugandan doctor working in the country died earlier this month.
Last week Sierra Leone's top Ebola doctor fell ill with the disease and in Liberia, Samaritan's Purse, a Christian charity, announced at the weekend that an American doctor was also battling Ebola. Dr Kent Bradley had been isolated at the group's Ebola treatment centre at the ELWA hospital in the Liberian capital, Monrovia.
Meanwhile, in Nigeria, officials announced on Friday that a Liberian official had died of Ebola after flying from Monrovia to Lagos raising fears that other passengers could take the disease beyond Africa. The WHO says the outbreak, the largest recorded, has also killed 319 people in Guinea and 224 in Sierra Leone.
Brisbane, who once served as a medical adviser to the former Liberian president, Charles Taylor, was working as a consultant with the internal medicine unit at the country's largest hospital, the John F Kennedy Memorial Medical Center in Monrovia.
After falling ill with Ebola, he was taken to a treatment centre on the outskirts of the capital, where he died, said Tolbert Nyenswah, an assistant health minister.Under the supervision of health workers, family members escorted the doctor's body to a burial location west of the city, Nyenswah said.
He added that another doctor who had been working in Liberia's central Bong County was also being treated for Ebola at the same centre where Brisbane died.
The situation 'is getting more and more scary,' Nyenswah said.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf used her Independence Day address to discuss a new taskforce to combat Ebola. Information minister, Lewis Brown, said: 'It will go from community to community, from village to village, from town to town in order to increase awareness.'
There is no known cure for Ebola, which begins with symptoms including fever and sore throat but then escalates to vomiting, diarrhoea and internal and external bleeding.
Experts believe the west African outbreak could have begun in January in south-east Guinea, though the first cases were not confirmed until March.
Since then, officials have tried to contain the disease by isolating victims and educating populations on how to avoid transmission, though porous borders, satellite outbreaks and widespread distrust of health workers have made the outbreak difficult to bring under control.
Post By http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/27/liberia-ebola-first-doctor-dies-brisbane-virus-outbreak
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