An editorial in FrontPageAfrica: SoS From Liberia: WHO, Others Must Step in Before We All Die. Excerpt:
Judging from what happened in Monrovia last week, self-seeking presidential aides and kitchen Cabinet officials will shortly conclude and run to the president to say that this is a call for an interim government. IT IS NOT!!!.
This is an honest and sincere appeal to international humanitarian groups and the WHO to move in and for the president to dissolve her "Special Ebola Task Force because they have all failed and appear incapable of solving this plague killing our people and flirting with anarchy.
This is an urgent SOS call to the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and every international humanitarian organization to please intervene in Liberia before Africa’s oldest republic loses its entire population.
The United Nations must immediately call for the disbandment of the Liberian government task force and replace it with an international medical and management team capable of righting the wrongs by the post-war nation’s health system and saving many more Liberians from losing their lives.
What happened last Saturday at a makeshift Ebola center in West Point is from our perspective the last straw that has broken whatever back this country or its government had in curbing further spread and containing this deadly plague that has so far killed more than 2000 people in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, since it emerged in February.
When residents in one of Liberia’s most populous and disease-infected areas run amok against an initiative undertaken by a volunteer nurse, who simply tried to do right for his people with a self-initiative isolation center because the government had turned its backs on the people, it is time for the international players to step in.
In nurse Sam Tarplah's own words: “Some of the people kept at the center at the MV Massaquoi School were diagnosed positive and told to be in isolation at home because of insufficient space at the ELWA isolation center.”
Tarplah said knowing the risk the presence of these Ebola positive patients will cause the community when they at home, he decided to keep them in one location though not in the same room. According to him, there were a total of 29 persons that the center but nine had died over the last few days. A day ago, he said a week patient fell on his forehead and died.
By nightfall Saturday night, at least seventeen positively tested Ebola patients had fled the facility. According to Tarplah, a lady from Bardnersville who brought food for her husband and a son, two of them Ebola positive, became angry when she was not allowed entry and as such some residents of West Point, assisted her in erecting sticks on the wall of the fence where the man and his son escaped. The remaining 17 left the isolation center assisted by angry residents of the West Point Community.
When government security and police forces are misguided in their priorities of sending armed police officers with teargas to shut down a newspaper office and arrest journalists in the middle of a State of Emergency, when those officers should be assisting health workers and makeshift Ebola centers like ones in areas like West Point, maintain order, it is time for the international players to step.
