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Blair Peterson

As Ebola Rages, Poor Planning Thwarts Efforts - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • But one piece is missing: staff. The facility opened recently with a skeleton crew. Now, in an especially hard-hit area where people are dying every day because they cannot get into an Ebola clinic, 60 of the 80 beds at the Kerry Town Ebola clinic are not being used.
  • It is like this with a lot here: good intentions, bad planning. Aid officials in Sierra Leone say poor coordination among aid groups, government mismanagement and some glaring inefficiencies are costing countless lives.
  • Even after patients recover, many treatment centers delay releasing them for more than a week until there are enough other survivors, sometimes dozens, to hold one huge goodbye ceremony for everyone — again, keeping desperately needed beds occupied. “I just wanted to get home and see my wife,” said Suliman Wafta, a recent Ebola survivor treated nearby. “But I had to wait eight extra days.
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  • “Why are the British here? To end Ebola, or party?” read a headline in a local newspaper. It added, “While their American counterparts are working hard to end Ebola in Liberia, our so-called colonial masters are busy living the life of Riley.”
  • Like others, the official kept citing the “Brits’ primacy” in Sierra Leone — a reference to how, several months ago, Western powers divided Ebola responsibilities in West Africa along historical lines, with the United States helping Liberia, a nation founded by freed American slaves in 1822; France helping a former colony, Guinea; and Britain helping its own former colony, Sierra Leone.
  • Many aid officials in Sierra Leone said they crave a more effective command structure. The government runs a national emergency center, but aid officials said that with scores of foreign experts, government delegations and private charities flocking here, coordination was still messy, with many gaps and overlaps. It is extremely difficult, they said, to get even the most basic information, including how many treatment centers exist.
  • There are also growing questions about corruption, with the government announcing recently that it had found 6,000 “ghost medical workers” on its payroll, even as real Ebola burial teams and front-line health officers say they have not been paid in weeks.
Blair Peterson

Despite Aid Push, Ebola Is Raging in Sierra Leone - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Discouraged, scared and furious, Sierra Leoneans are taking matters into their own hands. Laid-off teachers (all schools in this country are closed) race around on motorbikes, monitoring the sick.
  • Sierra Leone has an elaborate Ebola response system — on paper. It starts with a call to 117, the toll-free number for central dispatch. A surveillance team is sent out, then an ambulance takes a patient to a holding center, then blood tests and a proper treatment center where the patient might receive intravenous fluids or other special care.
  • “You can have as many helicopters, ships and kit here as you’d like,” said Lt. Colonel Matt Petersen, a British adviser. “But unless you change behavior, it’s not going to stop transmission.”
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  • Public health professionals are beginning to look harder at Sierra Leone’s culture, which is dominated by secret men’s and women’s societies that have certain rituals, especially around burials. Many people here — just like in other cultures — believe that the afterlife is more important than this one. A proper burial, in which the body is touched and carefully washed, is the best way to ensure a soul reaches its destination.
  • Seventy percent of new cases here, Western officials said, are directly linked to traditional burials.
  • Another issue are strikes. This week, burial workers in eastern Sierra Leone dragged corpses from a morgue and dumped them outside to protest delays in being paid. In Freetown last week, some surveillance workers — the emergency medical workers to suspected cases — refused to work, demanding back pay, which added to the problems of dispatching ambulances.
Blair Peterson

BBC News - Ebola crisis: The economic impact - 0 views

  • He said President Ernest Bai Koroma revealed this staggering and depressing news to ministers at a special cabinet meeting. "The agricultural sector is the most impacted in terms of Ebola because the majority of the people of Sierra Leone - about 66% - are farmers," he said.
  • Rio Tinto, the world's third largest mining company, which owns a share in Simandou, has donated $100,000 to the World Health Organization's work in the area and is also making sanitation equipment available to local people there.
  • A smaller British company, London Mining, has moved out some its non-essential expatriate staff from Sierra Leone, where mining has accounted for much of the country's recent growth. According to the International Monetary Fund, Sierra Leone's output grew by 20% last year; excluding iron ore mining, it grew by 5.5%.
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  • Sierra Leone and Liberia have both emerged from horrific civil wars and managed to rebuild their economies.
Blair Peterson

Despite Aid Push, Ebola Is Raging in Sierra Leone - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    "Despite Aid Push, Ebola Is Raging in Sierra Leone"
Blair Peterson

allAfrica.com: Sierra Leone: WFP And World Bank Scale Up Government Logistical Capacity... - 0 views

  • This follows a memorandum of understanding between the Government of Sierra Leone and the UN Agencies to implement the US$ 28 million World Bank-funded Ebola Response Project, of which US$ 9.5 million was allocated to WFP to deliver food and non-food items.
  • The World Bank partnership with government and the UN Agencies is part of concerted efforts to stop the rapid spread of Ebola Virus Disease in Sierra Leone. It seeks to scale up the country's logistical and operational capacity and mitigate the economic impact on affected communities.
Blair Peterson

Lockdown Begins in Sierra Leone to Battle Ebola - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The United States is planning to build as many as 17 Ebola treatment centers in Liberia, with about 1,700 treatment beds, while the United Nations is planning an expanded mission in the region, based in Accra, Ghana, according to Anthony Banbury, the United Nation’s Ebola operation crisis manager. It is intended to be more nimble than the United Nations’ notoriously bureaucratic operations, bringing in as many as 500 trucks and jeeps from other missions in Africa, possibly paying teams in one country to speed up safe burials, buying fuel for monitoring teams in another country, or offering helicopters to transport health workers where they are needed.
  • Whether Sierra Leone’s lockdown will constitute an effective response is open to question. Despite the mobilization, the volunteers hardly appeared to be thick on the ground. In some neighborhoods, residents said they were yet to see any of the green-vested young men and women who had volunteered.
Blair Peterson

http://www.who.int/countryfocus/cooperation_strategy/ccs_sle_en.pdf - 0 views

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    WHO cooperation strategy for Sierra Leone.
Blair Peterson

Projects : Ebola Emergency Response Project | The World Bank - 1 views

  • The first component, support to the EVD outbreak response plans and strengthening essential health services will contribute to finance critical gaps in ongoing emergency response efforts funded by governments and development partners in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
  • he second component, human resources scale up for outbreak response and essential health services will supplement the efforts of governments and other partners to motivate and reward health workers in the affected countries to work on the EVD emergency response and provide other essential health services.
  • The third component, provision of food and basic supplies to quarantined populations and EVD affected household's aims to improve access to food and other basic supplies for the EVD affected households in the quarantined areas and other hot zones in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. 
Blair Peterson

The Ebola Outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone - 0 views

  • The Economic Community of West Africa (ECOWAS) created a ‘solidarity fund’ to contain and manage the outbreak, [17] and the World Health Organisation convened an emergency meeting of regional health ministers in Accra to strengthen surveillance operations and facilitate cross-border consultations. [18] The World Health Organisation also opened a Sub-Regional Outbreak Coordinating Center in Conakry. [19] Doctors Without Borders has deployed 300 personnel to assist in health care facilities, and both the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the European Union have provided scientific personnel and resources to assist with laboratory testing and government coordination. [20]
  • The World Health Organisation fulfilled its coordinating mission by organising a meeting of regional health officials in Accra in early July—but that was three-and-a-half months after the first report of the disease. WHO’s Sub-Regional Outbreak Coordination Center has the potential to be a useful resource, but it took nearly four months from the outbreak’s beginning until WHO began such operations. Given how quickly Ebola spreads and its virulence, such a delay helped the disease gain a foothold in the region. Arresting the spread of infectious diseases requires quicker action.
  • First, the current response needs to be ratcheted up. Opening sub-regional command centers, deploying personnel from governmental and nongovernmental sources, and providing financial resources are all important—but they need to be done in greater number and with greater urgency. The initial efforts are not necessarily failures; they are just too small and slow in response to the overwhelming nature of this unprecedented outbreak.
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  • Second, efforts to provide health care services and outreach to affected communities need to take concerted efforts to integrate local cultural contexts and health care measures into Ebola control.
  • Third, there need to be serious long-term efforts to improve the health care systems, disease surveillance capabilities, and laboratory resources in all three states.
Blair Peterson

Global Response to Ebola Highlights Challenges - 1 views

  • A senior European diplomat in Geneva involved in health issues, who was not authorized to speak publicly, lamented the limited international response. “The scale of the epidemic is what the international community is still not getting,” the diplomat said. “It’s becoming obvious that what you need is to scale up by a factor of 20. There’s not enough international coordination and imagination going into this.”
  • uba sent 165 doctors and nurses last week, China has expanded a medical team deployed there, and British personnel are scouting sites for at least five new centers and 700 additional beds that will bring the total closer to the World Health Organization’s target of about 1,300 beds.
  • United States delivers on a pledge to provide up to 17 100-bed units, said Dr. Ian Norton, who is coordinating foreign medical teams for the W.H.O. In Guinea, the W.H.O. says there are four treatment centers working with 160 beds available, with 100 more beds needed.
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  • The World Food Program, acting beyond its core mandate as the United Nations agency responsible for fighting hunger, is also joining the drive, planning to build up to 30 Ebola treatment centers capable of handling 3,000 patients, said Denise Brown, the agency’s regional director for West Africa.
  • American troops are already on the ground in Liberia to build treatment centers, and Britain announced on Wednesday that it would send about 600 military personnel to Sierra Leone to build units and train local staff members. But it remains unclear who will manage and operate the units.
  • After Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippines at the end of 2013, the W.H.O. had the support of 151 aid agencies. Six months into the Ebola crisis in three countries, only four medical organizations are on the ground.
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