By Umaru Fofana
Ebola is taking a heavy toll on our health care professionals. You have to have the steel of a brave soldier to confront an enemy that’s just killed your colleague – not least when you cannot see that enemy and you have an option to flee.
So if our health workers retreat from the Ebola fight in the face of losing over 100 of their colleagues to the virus, it is perhaps understandable albeit unpleasant and seemingly cowardly. Staying on as they have done, especially considering what facilities exist and what conditions they work under, is bravery, nationalism and heroism.
At the last count over 150 had been infected with the virus, with over two-thirds having died of it. They include seven of our doctors. And it is very obvious that once the caregivers succumb to a disease like Ebola, the consequences can be unimaginably dire for especially the ordinary non-medical public.
Despite that sacrifice, not a single investigation has been mounted to know the cause of infection and death of any of those health workers. Not even the lead virologist, Dr Skeh Umar Khan. For all you know such an investigation could have helped prevent other health workers from contracting the disease once the cause was identified and dealt with. Poor equipment, exhaustion, poor training, etc could have been the cause hence would have been addressed.
Keeping our health workers safe must be a sine qua non. They suffer in responding to a virus that has outpaced them because of our government’s complete lack of a plan or even clue in dealing with it especially at the initial stage. Some of the health workers – doctors, nurses, lab technicians, etc – do so without the most basic of equipment. Those who have some of that have what is akin to fighting Al Qaeda with a catapult – grossly inadequate materiel.
The health workers at some of our Ebola checkpoints barely have protective gear. The community health centre in Lunsar has one thermometer, so that when a team goes to outlying villages on a mobile treatment campaign, the clinic is left without one as I witnessed a couple of weeks ago.
An equally important thing our health workers are being denied is badly-needed rest. Very few, if any, have proceeded on any form of leave since the Ebola outbreak. Their expatriate colleagues who come here hardly work for more than a month without proceeding on leave to spend time with their families back home and, equally important, to rest. And the month of December will prove crucial for our Ebola response when many – perhaps most – of those foreign health workers leave to spend Christmas with their families. Who will fault them for that!
Our health workers should be rotated to allow them time to rest and refresh their physical and mental being. Working without a break to rest exhausts them and is bound to make them make mistakes that could prove costly to them and by extension the public.
I know their numbers are small and resting time for some would also have its own dire implications. This is where I think the government and the UN World Health Organisation could engage our retired doctors – both at home and abroad – who still have steel in them. And I know there are a few around. In time of war veteran soldiers are called up to help. The Ebola outbreak has been declared as a war so recalling our veteran health workers is just within the pale.
I have also observed that we are not doing a good job in the tracing of Ebola contacts. This is as important as treating the Ebola sick or burying the Ebola dead, if the spread is to be stemmed. Our teachers who are being paid now but are not working due to the closure of schools should be engaged and trained to help do this. If contacts are not traced, treating the sick will be a never-ending enterprise, as those who would have come into contact with the infected will not be identified and isolated until the 21-day incubation period expires without a trace. So the spread continues.
Invariably, quarantining of homes of Ebola patients or dead – a part of contact-tracing – is vital. It is not being well done right now. I have been to many places where people have called in vain for homes to be quarantined. The headman of Rogbangba – just outside Hastings – has been calling me every day complaining that his request for an Ebola-plagued home to be quarantined has not yielded – one week since he started calling for it. He and his community are not alone. Many villages across the rural part of the Western Area are in a similar category.
The quarantining of Port Loko and Bombali districts is a joke. People keep moving in and out of these places without authorisation. Vehicles ply the routes unhindered. This, despite checkpoints being dotted all over the place.
If our health workers are not safeguarded, the catastrophe that is lurking in the air will descend on us. So bring back our retirees to get the best from the currently serving health workers.
© Politico 25/11/14
