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| Africa Subsaharan |
| African Ebola doctors die for lack of gloves |
| 2014-08-16 |
| ERGEANT KOLLIE TOWN, Liberia -- Rubber gloves were nearly as scarce as doctors in this part of rural Liberia, so Melvin Korkor would swaddle his hands in plastic grocery bags to deliver babies. His staff didn't bother even with those when a woman in her 30s stopped by complaining of a headache. Five nurses, a lab technician -- then a local woman who was helping out -- cared for her with their bare hands. Within weeks, all of them died. The woman with a headache, they learned too late, had Ebola. On July 3, the staff realized that the woman they had been treating with bare hands wasn't a local villager with a headache. She was an Ebola patient who had broken out of a hospital about 100 miles away under circumstances that are still unclear. By July 15, the woman had died. So had three nurses. Somewhere in the workplace exchange of handshakes and sweat, Dr. Korkor caught the virus, too. Days later, Dr. Korkor felt a chill rush through his body. He locked himself in a bedroom away from his family until a blood test returned -- positive for Ebola. A car took him to an Ebola ward in the capital. For five days, he read the Bible on a cot in an Ebola ward, watching his colleagues bleed to death from a disease they weren't equipped or trained to treat. The room smelled of bleach, blood and vomit, he said. Most of the roughly 15 patients inside appeared to be health workers, including the man dying next to him in their two-cot cubicle. One morning, Dr. Korkor realized he was lying across from the chief doctor at the country's top hospital, Samuel Brisbane, under whom he had done his residency. "He said, 'My son, you're here?'" Dr. Korkor recalled. "I said, 'Yes, Doc.'" Dr. Brisbane died the next day, his obituary displayed prominently on front pages of the country's newspapers. He probably contracted Ebola giving a patient cardiopulmonary resuscitation without a pair of gloves, said Wvanne McDonald, chief executive officer of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Medical Center, where Dr. Brisbane worked. For the next three days, Dr. Korkor forced down balls of rice and, by his count, drank 24 bottles of water -- one every hour. Finally, he felt his chills disappear and his hunger rebound with ferocity. After a blood test and four showers in bleach-spiked water, the staff let him leave. On a recent Tuesday morning, chickens were clucking in the yard at his home as he sat in a chair under a tree. "Ebola-free!" he laughed over the phone to a friend. The ordeal, though, has left him torn. He can stay in Liberia and risk his life to fight the outbreak -- on a $1,000-a-month paycheck -- or try to move his family to America, to work his way up a hospital system that hasn't collapsed. He glanced at the porch, where his wife, daughter, two sons, mother-in-law, niece and niece's daughter were hanging about. "If I'm going to die, God forbid, who's going to take care of them?" he asked. If he stays in Liberia, Dr. Korkor said, he is going to need a great deal more supplies. He isn't going back to work until he gets them. "This time around," he said, "we're not going to improvise." ---- As of Tuesday, at least 36 health workers in Liberia had died from the disease, according to health ministry records. Many who have caught but survived the virus are traumatized, as are colleagues, and may prove difficult to coax back to work. Their absence is deeply felt. Even before Ebola, Liberia -- with just 51 doctors for four million people -- had the second-fewest physicians per person on Earth, after Tanzania, according to the WHO. Hospital staff members throughout Liberia, including at Dr. Korkor's Phebe Hospital, have gone on strike until the government meets their demands. They want rubber gloves, safety goggles, protective suits, life insurance and a fivefold pay increase for the hazardous work. The government has said it plans to meet those requests. In the meantime, because doctors aren't at work, other diseases besides Ebola are going untreated. As a result, those ailments -- chiefly typhoid and dysentery -- may be killing more West Africans than Ebola, according to the United Nations Children's Fund. Hospitals across the region have closed at the peak of malaria season. Meningitis, measles and polio vaccinations are on hold, said Liberia's information minister, Lewis Brown. A Liberian clinic called Dolo Town Health Center shut down last month when it ran out of gloves and left staff members to choose between treating Ebola patients bare-handed or leaving, said MacFarland Keraulah, a physician's assistant. The clinic had received only one glove delivery since April, and it was a single box of 50 pairs. Since the staff walked off, 37 people have died of Ebola in that area, two hours outside the Liberian capital of Monrovia. Seven were health workers at another now-closed health center, according to workers. Both clinics are in a 200-square-mile forest of rubber trees. "We are sitting inside one of the world's largest rubber plantations, and people are dying because we don't have gloves," Mr. Keraulah said. |
| Posted by:Anguper Hupomosing9418 |