Guinea has arrested six people suspected of killing eight members of a delegation visiting a rural community in the country’s south east to educate them about Ebola, the country’s prime minister confirmed Friday.
Security forces have been deployed to the area and a criminal investigation in underway to determine whether there were others involved in the killings, Prime Minister Mohamed Said Fofana said.
“All the people implicated in these murders will be tracked down and brought before criminal courts to be punished with the maximum severity the law allows,” said Fofana.
The delegation of government officials and journalists visited the administrative area of Womey – located close to the borders of Liberia and Ivory Coast – earlier this week.
Among the delegation members was the governor of N’Zerekore, the largest city in the country’s south east, a local health director, the deputy manager of N’Zerekore Hospital, a director of a local health centre as well as several journalists.
In neighbouring Sierra Leone, streets were empty on Friday as the country began a three-day, government-imposed curfew to gain control of an Ebola outbreak that has killed more than 2,600 people in West Africa.
Security personnel were deployed to all major roads to ensure Sierra Leone’s roughly 6 million residents were complying with the lockdown, which confines people to their homes from September 19 to 21.
“We need to restrict movement for us all to avoid body contact,” government spokesman Abdulai Baratay told dpa.
The only people allowed on the streets are 28,000 volunteers carrying out a door-to-door campaign to trace Ebola cases and educate people about the deadly virus.
They will also hand out 1.5 million bars of soap to encourage hand washing, which is crucial in the containment of the disease.
The volunteers have been split into 7,000 groups of four, consisting of a health worker, a community representative, a civil society representative and an assistant.
A key goal of the campaign is to identify those trying to conceal infections, President Ernest Bai Koroma told national radio, adding that he predicted a 15-20-per-cent rise in suspected Ebola cases by the end of the campaign.
Sierra Leone reported 1,673 suspected and confirmed cases on September 14, of which 562 people have died, according to the World Health Organization.
The country’s emergency operations centre has increased the number of isolation facilities and ramped up logistical support in anticipation of additional cases, coordinator Steven Gaojia said.
Humanitarian organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has criticized the lockdown, saying quarantines could prompt people to hide potential Ebola cases and spread the disease further.
“It has been our experience that lockdowns and quarantines do not help control Ebola as they end up driving people underground and jeopardizing the trust between people and health providers,” MSF said.
What is urgently needed in the affected countries is additional equipment and health workers to tackle the epidemic, the organization said.
Also on Friday, an MSF staff member infected with Ebola in Liberia was evacuated to France. She arrived at a military hospital in Paris where she is set to receive “experimental treatment,” according to the French health ministry.
Also on Friday, Germany was preparing to begin military airlifts in Senegal’s capital Dakar to fly supplies to the three nations hardest hit by the Ebola epidemic – Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
“We are doing everything in our logistical power to help, including the training of medical personnel,” said Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Germany will supply a mobile Ebola treatment station in Liberia, which it says will accommodate around 50 patients at a time.
Berlin has come under fire from aid organizations including MSF for not coordinating a timely response to the epidemic. The organization said that the mobile treatment clinic would be ineffective if Germany failed to fly in its own medical workers to support the effort.
GNA
