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 The warning by the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER)
came as Sierra Leone's Deputy Minister of Health said Ebola had so
badly damaged confidence in the West African country's health system
that many people were dying from other diseases as the sick refused
to come to clinics for treatment.
Some 4,818 people have died of Ebola, mostly in Sierra Leone,
Liberia and neighboring Guinea, the World Health Organization (WHO)
said on Wednesday.
But while the situation is improving in Liberia and stable in
Guinea, two-thirds of the new cases recorded in the past three weeks
have been in Sierra Leone.
UNMEER said at present Sierra Leone had just four Ebola Treatment
Centers (ETCs) with a total capacity of 288 beds and these were
treating 196 cases of the disease as of Sunday.
However, the U.N. mission said it suspects 50 percent of cases of
the Ebola virus disease (EVD) were not being reported in Sierra
Leone.
To control the outbreak, UNMEER estimated a total of 1,864 beds were
needed by December but the 10 new treatment centers currently
planned had a total capacity of just 1,133 beds.
"Lack of available beds in ETCs is forcing families to care for
patients at home, where caregivers are unable to adequately protect
themselves from EVD exposure, thereby increasing transmission risk,"
it said in a report released late on Wednesday.
UNMEER also reported a growing incidence of families leaving their
quarantined homes due to a lack of food and non-food items, but did
not provide further details.
It said the World Food Program (WFP) had distributed rations to 80
percent of quarantined household and communities in the hard-hit
area of Waterloo, in the outskirts of Freetown.
ISOLATED FOOD SHORTAGES
However, WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin, who has just
completed a three-day visit to Sierra Leone, said there was no
information to suggest this was a widespread phenomenon.
"There were isolated incidents where we did not receive a notice
before the area was quarantined and so we did not provide the food,"
she said. "We are working to scale up as quickly as possible to
ensure that no family need go in search for food."
Cousin said the U.N. agency had already reached its target of
providing food to 1.3 million people in the region and would be
scaling this up to reach more people in the weeks ahead.
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Sierra Leone's Deputy Health Minister Madina Radman said the
country's failure to clearly separate its Ebola treatment centers
from its regular health facilities had destroyed confidence in
hospitals and clinics.
"We are struggling to regain confidence in our health facilities
because of this mistake," she said at a WHO conference in Benin.
"About 50 percent of the deaths in the country are not Ebola but,
because people fear to come to some of our healthcare facilities,
they die needlessly in the community due to other treatable
diseases."
According to the WHO, only 22 percent of the planned 4,707 beds
needed in Ebola treatment units are in operation, U.N. spokesman
Stephane Dujarric said on Thursday.
"The establishment of more beds is in part held back by challenges
in finding sufficient numbers of foreign medical teams to operate
the centers," Dujarric told reporters.
Dujarric said Sierra Leone had five foreign medical teams operating
Ebola treatment centers but needed at least a further 10. Guinea had
two foreign medical teams operating Ebola treatment centers but
needed at least five more. Liberia has three foreign teams and
needed 13 more.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, who visited
Guinea, Sierra Leona and Liberia last week, warned that restrictions
on aid workers returning home from West Africa could deter thousands
from volunteering.
Several U.S. states, including New York where the U.N. has its
headquarters, have imposed a mandatory quarantine on healthcare
workers returning from the region.
(Additional reporting by Tom Miles in Geneva; Editing by Gareth
Jones)
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