Liberians, police face off as Ebola dead lie on road
MONROVIA, Liberia — Riot police raced to central Liberia on Saturday to put down a demonstration by crowds blocking the country’s busiest highway to protest the government’s delay in collecting bodies of Ebola victims.
In neighboring Guinea, where the deadly Ebola outbreak emerged in March, health officials announced Saturday that the country was closing its land borders with Liberia and Sierra Leone — two of the countries where the killer virus has now spread and where deaths are mounting.
Nearly 300 people already have died from the disease in Liberia.
Several bodies had been lying by the roadside for two days in the town of Weala, about 50 miles from the capital, Monrovia, residents said.
The Ebola virus spreads through the bodily fluids of its victims and many have fallen ill after touching or handling corpses.
Liberia’s government has ordered that all Ebola victims should be cremated after communities raised opposition to neighborhood burials for fear of further contamination.
Information Minister Lewis Brown sounded a warning on state radio Saturday, telling the demonstrators that “police are on their way to you.”
“Security people are on their way to put things under control,” Brown said. “We don’t want people taking the law into their own hands.”
The latest Ebola outbreak is the largest and longest ever recorded for the disease, and so far has killed at least 961 people, according to figures released Friday by the United Nations health agency.
The situation is particularly dire, though, in Liberia where Doctors Without Borders has described the conditions as “catastrophic.”
“There are reports of dead bodies lying in streets and houses,” said the group’s emergency coordinator in Liberia, Lindis Hurum, in a recent situation update.
At least 40 health workers in Liberia have contracted Ebola in recent weeks, and most of the city’s hospitals are closed, Hurum said.
On Saturday, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was to meet with other health workers at City Hall in Monrovia.
“The president wants to express the collective gratitude of the entire nation to our health care workers who have continued to make tremendous sacrifice for this country and people,” Brown said.
State radio broadcaster Smith Toby called health workers “front-line soldiers” leading the fight against Ebola.
Liberia has launched “Operation White Shield” under which soldiers are deployed in different locations and at checkpoints outside the capital to discourage travel.
The deployment is part of Sirleaf’s declaration of emergency to exert more control in fighting the disease.
Health workers were deployed Saturday alongside soldiers at checkpoints to take the temperatures of commuters. People are to be blocked from leaving from one point to another if their temperatures are above normal.
Also Saturday, a Catholic humanitarian group based in Spain said a Congolese nun who was working in Liberia has died of Ebola.
The San Juan de Dios hospital order announced Saturday that Sister Chantal Pascaline died “from Ebola in the Hospital San Jose de Monrovia, despite the care she received from a volunteer nurse.”
Pascaline belonged to the same order as a Spanish missionary priest and nun evacuated to Madrid by jet last week.
Both are in stable condition in a Madrid hospital, officials have said.