Liberian president opens new Ebola centre

LIBERIA’S president opened one of the country’s largest Ebola treatment centres in the capital, Monrovia, yesterday.

US and UN officials, as well as Cuban doctors, were among the crowd as president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf opened the treatment centre, which can hold 200 patients and may eventually treat as many as 300. With the opening of the centre, an Ebola treatment unit at JFK Medical Centre has been closed, centralising treatment.

Assistant health minister Tolbert Nyenswah, who heads the government’s Ebola response, said the JFK Ebola medical team and a team of Cuban doctors would be in charge of the new centre, located in Congo Town in east Monrovia.

The World Health Organisation said this week that the rate of infection in Liberia appeared to be falling but warned that the response effort must be kept up or the trend could be reversed.

Foreign aid is now pouring into Liberia and other West African countries hard hit by Ebola. The US is sending thousands of troops to build more centres.

Some 13,700 people have fallen ill, and nearly 5,000 have died. The outbreak has hit Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea hardest and all three countries have resorted to extraordinary measures to combat it.

Ms Sirleaf said: “We can all imagine those early days when journalists went into the streets and into the communities and took those pictures that were put on all the television screens all over the world of the dying, the sick, the dead who could not picked up on time and portrayed us as a nation in despair, a nation confused not knowing this enemy which it had to confront.”

She added: “To our health workers, we owe you a lot for the courage you continue to bring forth.”