Ebola kills 84 in three days amid Liberia hunt for missing patients

The Ebola virus killed 84 people in just three days, bringing the global death toll to 1,229, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said Tuesday.

The death toll, which passed the 1,000-mark over a week ago, soared higher from last Thursday to Saturday.

The number of confirmed infections jumped by 113 over the three days, bringing the total number of cases to 2,240, the UN health agency said.

The epidemic, which has hit four west African nations since it broke out in Guinea at the start of the year, is by far the deadliest since Ebola was discovered four decades ago in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Sierra Leone recorded 38 new infections and 17 fatalities, the new WHO data showed.

As a result, Sierra Leone’s total case count increased to 848 and its death toll to 365.

Guinea counted 24 new cases and 14 new deaths.

That lifted the total number of cases to 543, with 394 deaths.

All told, Nigeria has now seen 15 cases and four fatalities, the data show.

Meanwhile, Liberia was desperately searching for 17 Ebola patients who fled an attack on a quarantine centre in the capital Monrovia, as the outbreak appeared to overwhelm authorities in west Africa’s worst-hit nation. Searches of the teeming West Point slum have so far failed to turn up any of the missing victims as neighbouring Guinea said a wave of sick Liberians had begun crossing the border, which it had officially closed 10 days ago.

EBOLA MEDICAL FACILITY RAIDED

Club-wielding youths raided a medical facility set up in a high school in the dense-populated Monrovia slum on Saturday, some shouting “there’s no Ebola”, echoing wild rumours that the epidemic had been made up by the West.

Officials are considering sealing off the area — home to 75,000 people — to stop the nightmare scenario of people with the highly contagious disease wandering the city where unburied corpses have lain abandoned in the streets.

Mr Wilmont Johnson, head of a youth association in West Point which organised a search for the patients, told journalists Monday that “those who saw them passing told us that they have gone into other communities”.

The head of the Health Workers Association of Liberia, George Williams, said of the 29 patients in the raided unit “all had tested positive for Ebola” and were receiving preliminary treatment before being taken to hospital.

Mr Fallah Boima, whose son Michel was among the patients who fled, told AFP: “I am afraid that he could die somewhere and I will not know.”

Outside the capital in Caldwell, relatives of the dead criticised the government for the slowness of its response, claiming that bodies were being left uncollected there for days. Sheikh Idrissa Swaray, the father of one victim, slammed the way the government was handling the crisis as “completely wrong”.

He said in one case a man had died and his wife, possibly infected herself, had run away.

“We don’t even know where the wife has gone and the body is still here.

Three days now and the body has not been taken.”

Dr Sakoba Keita, who is heading Guinea’s fight against the epidemic, told AFP that a wave of sick Liberians were crossing the border in the Macenta district in the south of country.