Karrige, ørkenagtige Mali i Vestafrika, der er stillet så megen dansk bistand i udsigt, har ikke vist sig kapabel til at håndtere den frygtede lidelse – hele hospitaler sætte under karantæne og patienter afvises, personale har fået udstyr men ude af stand til at bruge det og videre i den dur.
BAMAKO, 18 November 2014 (IRIN): The failure of a top Malian hospital to detect probable cases of Ebola has raised questions about whether the country’s health system is sufficiently prepared to tackle the disease.
“We have several confirmed cases,” Samba Sow, head of the Mali’s National Centre for Disease Control (CNAM), told IRIN. “Our goal is to prevent the virus from spreading.”
But the government only released an Ebola emergency plan on 30 October, a week after the first Ebola case.
No training
In Kayes, where a two-year-old girl tested positive for Ebola on 23 October, the hospital was caught off-guard.
Only two of its 160 workers had received training on how to detect and treat Ebola patients and how to protect themselves while doing so, said hospital director Toumani Konaré.
“The staff had the right protective gear, but they did not know how to use it,” he told IRIN.
Before the current outbreak in Mali, the World Health Organization (WHO) had categorized the country as at-risk, due to its long border and strong economic ties with Guinea, where the epidemic began.
It was targeted as a country to receive technical assistance, including training on infection prevention, epidemiological surveillance and contact tracing.
Vigilance only at the border
Samba Sow said preparations started in April. However, those preparations were focused mostly on the 805 km border that Mali shares with Guinea.
The government started to send a few health workers to check travellers for fever and other signs of the virus among the chaos of trucks, buses, bush taxis and motorbikes at border checkpoints.
The Ministry of Health says the Kouremalé border checkpoint, where an imam who died of Ebola in Mali on 27 October had entered from Guinea, checks more than 1,000 people and 150 vehicles per day.
“It was a failure by the clinic to not detect or report the case until a second staff member fell ill,” Ibrahima Socé-Fall, the representative for the World Health Organization (WHO) in Mali, said. Mali’s president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, ordered an investigation.
On 17 November local authorities announced that they were trying to trace more than 500 people who may have been exposed to the virus.
But some Malians are concerned:
“I wonder how the Guinean patient could cross our borders and be admitted so easily to a clinic as renowned as Clinique Pasteur,” said Moussa Camara of Mali’s National Youth Council, adding:
“The fact that the patient was coming from Kourémalé in Guinea, a centre of the Ebola outbreak, should have alerted authorities.”
Ibrahima Socé-Fall, the World Health Organization (WHO) representative in Mali, said the country has the capacity to tackle the disease. “You can not say Mali was not prepared, people were trained,” Fall told IRIN, although he did not specify how many.
On the plus side…
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http://www.irinnews.org/report/100853/questions-over-mali-s-ebola-response
