Guinea has suffered a setback in its fight against Ebola with a rash of new cases, including three doctors infected by the virus, with officials blaming weak surveillance and a failure to follow safety procedures.
The outbreak, which began in eastern Guinea more than a year ago and has killed over 10,000 people in the three West African countries worst hit, had appeared to be on the wane, but Guinea has seen cases rise for three consecutive weeks, according to World Health Organization data.
A government health report from the weekend showed there were 21 new cases in a single day, a spike from the recent daily average of eight.
One big source of concern is a chain of new infections that can be linked back to a woman who died of Ebola and was not buried safely, according to Fatoumata Lejeune-Kaba, spokeswoman for the U.N.'s Ebola emergency response mission UNMEER.
"It's a major setback .... It's due to individual behaviours. That is having a devastating effect on the community. People are simply not practising the safety rules that we have been talking about for a year," she told Reuters.
Of the other two countries worst hit, Sierra Leone has also seen a spate of new cases while Liberia has no known cases at present and is waiting to be declared free of the disease.
The new cases in Guinea are in the capital and the southwestern town of Forecariah but if the situation is not brought under control they could spread across borders, said Lejeune-Kaba.
A spokesman for Guinea's anti-Ebola task force, said new cases came from high risk Ebola contacts who had left Forecariah and developed symptoms elsewhere, pointing to poor surveillance.
"There are numerous gaps in the Ebola response in Guinea, notably in surveillance of contacts, and that explains the difficulty in making any lasting progress towards ending the epidemic," said a spokesman for medical charity MSF.
The three doctors were infected at the Ignace Deen hospital in Conakry, which is not an Ebola centre. More than 50 doctors in Guinea have caught the virus during the outbreak.
A source in the health ministry said infections at the Conakry hospital were due to a "lack of vigilance", saying staff had been told to protect themselves.
President Alpha Conde says he hopes to get to zero Ebola cases by mid-April, ahead of elections planned for October.
Setbacks in the campaign against Ebola might delay investment into Guinea's underdeveloped natural resources.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article