Freetown - A second senior doctor in Sierra Leone was
confirmed dead from Ebola on Wednesday as west Africa
anxiously awaited the arrival of experimental drugs to tackle
the deadliest-ever outbreak of the virus.
Sierre Leone's chief medical officer Brima Kargbo said
Modupeh Cole, a senior physician in the capital Freetown, had
been "instrumental in the fight against the Ebola virus".
Cole's death came only a fortnight after the country's only
virologist and leading Ebola expert, Umar Khan, succumbed to
the tropical disease.
Another of the worst-hit countries, Liberia, is scrambling to
save two of its own infected doctors and hopes an
experimental serum from the United States will arrive in time.
The presidency said Tuesday it had received approval from the
US Food and Drug Administration for the use of a barely-
tested ZMapp treatment that has shown positive early results.
The two infected doctors have given their written consent to
try the drug, which will be delivered to the country within 48
hours. A third doctor has already died from the virus.
The World Health Organization declared Tuesday it was ethical
to try largely untested treatments "in the special
circumstances of this Ebola outbreak".
The company behind ZMapp said it had sent all its available
supplies to the region following an outcry over the fact it had
so far only been used on Westerners, but supplies are
extremely limited.
- 'We are all scared' -
Germany on Wednesday called on its nationals to leave the
three worst-hit countries Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone,
although it said it was keeping its embassies open.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday announced plans to step up
the global response while urging governments to "avoid panic
and fear" over a preventable disease.
His comments came after Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai
Koroma expressed his "utter dismay" at the "slow pace" of the
international community in responding to the outbreak.
In Freetown, the tropical fever is the only topic of
conversation.
"We are all scared because of the way Ebola is spreading but
we are taking all the necessary precautions," says Waisu
Gassama, 27, who works in the HIV department of the
dilapidated, century-old Connaught Hospital.
Outside the hospital, soldiers say they have been drafted in to
guard doctors and nurses, many of whom have been targeted
by angry mobs blaming modern medicine for exacerbating
the epidemic.
The epidemic, the worst since Ebola was first discovered four
decades ago in what was then Zaire, has killed over 1,000
people since early this year, the WHO said.
West African regional bloc ECOWAS said one of its officials had
died from the disease in Nigeria, taking the total number of
deaths in the country to three.
Cases have so far been limited to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra
Leone, which account for the bulk of victims, and Nigeria.
Terror has gripped the impoverished west African countries,
with harrowing tales emerging of people being shunned by
their villages as the virus fells those around them.
When AFP visited the Liberian village of Ballajah, some 150
kilometres (90 miles) from the capital Monrovia, 12-year-old
Fatu Sherrif had been locked away with her mother's body
without food and water for a week.
Her cries went unanswered as panicked residents fled the
village when both her parents fell sick.
Fatu later died and her brother Barnie, 15, despite testing
negative for Ebola, was left alone and hungry in an abandoned
house.
"Nobody wants to come near me and they know people told
them that I don't have Ebola," he told AFP.
- Promising vaccines -
Although hopes have been heaped on the ZMapp treatment, it
exists in such small quantities that only a handful of victims
are likely to get access in the short term.
Its effectiveness is also far from proven, having only
previously been tested on monkeys.
It appears to have had a positive effect on two US aid workers
infected in Liberia, but an elderly Spanish priest also infected
in the country, died in a Madrid hospital Tuesday despite being
treated with ZMapp.
There is currently no available cure or vaccine for Ebola,
which the WHO has declared a global public health
emergency, and the use of experimental drugs has stoked a
fierce ethical debate.
Sierra Leone's health ministry spokesman Sidi Yahya Tunis told
AFP the country had officially requested a shipment of the
serum.
While the stock of ZMapp in the US has been exhausted for
now, WHO assistant director general Marie-Paule Kieny
stressed there were other "potential therapies and vaccines...
considered very serious alternatives" and that two possible
vaccines were moving rapidly towards clinical trials.
She said plenty of drugs had been developed "to a point", but
companies had not footed the bill for expensive clinical trials
as the virus was "typically a disease of poor people in poor
countries where there is no market".
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