Liberia faces healthcare strike

MONROVIA: Liberia on Monday faced a nationwide walkout by healthcare workers demanding danger money to care for Ebola patients, in an epidemic that has already killed dozens of their colleagues.

The strike threat came as the US scrambled to find out how a Texan healthcare worker contracted the tropical virus, in the first case of contamination on US soil.

The new infection dealt a blow to global efforts to stem an outbreak that has claimed more than 4,000 lives, most of them in the west African countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone and the hardest-hit, Liberia. Monday’s strike call in Liberia came in defiance of an official request to avoid industrial action during the Ebola crisis, which has killed more than 2,300 in Liberia and overwhelmed its skeletal health service.

The chairman of the Liberian health workers’ union, Joseph Tamba, said the walkout concerned “every hospital and every health centre including Ebola Treatment Units”. Healthcare workers are on the frontline of the worst outbreak on record of Ebola, which spreads through contact with bodily fluids, with 95 killed in Liberia alone, according to the World Health Organisation.

With monthly salaries said to be as low as $250 a month, calls are mounting for pay commensurate to the acute risk of dealing with Ebola, for which there is no vaccine or widely-available treatment. Meanwhile, The Madrid hospital said on Monday that Spain will be free from the threat of further contagion from Ebola on October 27 if all those who had close contact with an infected nurse remain without symptoms by then.