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Chinese medics boost for Sierra Leone as Ebola crisis escalates
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CHINA will send more medics to Ebola-hit Sierra Leone to help boost laboratory testing for the virus, raising the total number of Chinese medical experts there to 174, the United Nations said yesterday.
“The most urgent immediate need in the Ebola response is for more medical staff,” World Health Organization chief Margaret Chan said in a statement, hailing the Chinese commitment.
China has said it will dispatch a mobile laboratory team to Sierra Leone, where more than 500 people have died so far.
It will send a 59-person team from the Chinese Center for Disease Control, including epidemiologists, clinicians and nurses, the WHO said.
“The newly announced team will join 115 Chinese medical staff on the ground in Sierra Leone virtually since the beginning,” Chan said, stressing that the new commitment was “a huge boost, morally and operationally.”
The Chinese contribution comes in response to the WHO’s urgent appeal to countries around the globe to step up their assistance to help bring the raging epidemic under control.
The Ebola contagion has already killed more than 2,400 people in west Africa since it erupted earlier this year.
Britain is planning to build and operate a clinic in Liberia, and Cuba has promised to send more than 160 health workers.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, meanwhile, announced late on Monday that it had opened its first Ebola treatment center in Kenema, one of the districts of Sierra Leone worst affected by the deadly outbreak.
The center, which is staffed by 19 international workers and 80 national employees, will have room for 60 patients, the IFRC said.
The first patients, including an 11-year-old girl from Freetown, were already being treated there, it added.
The tropical Ebola virus can fell its victims within days, causing severe fever and muscle pain, weakness, vomiting and diarrhea — in some of the most serious cases shutting down organs and causing unstoppable bleeding.
No licensed vaccine or treatment exists but health experts are looking at fast-tracking two potential vaccines and eight treatments, including the drug ZMapp.
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