(MONROVIA, Liberia)
Some health workers in Liberia have turned up for work, defying calls for a strike amid the Ebola outbreak, a BBC reporter says.
However, the picture is still unclear, as there are also reports of workers heeding the strike call, the BBC’s Jonathan Paye-Layleh in Liberia says.
The National Health Workers Association wants an increase in the monthly risk fee paid to those treating Ebola cases.
Liberia is worst-affected by the deadliest ever Ebola outbreak.
The disease has killed more than 4,000 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria since it was identified in March.
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Margaret Chan said the outbreak threatened the “very survival of societies and governments in already very poor countries”.
“I have never seen an infectious disease contribute so strongly to potential state failure,” she said in a speech delivered on her behalf at a health conference in the Philippines.
In the US, President Barack Obama has directed more steps to be taken to ensure high safety procedures when dealing with suspected Ebola patients after a health worker treating an Ebola victim caught the virus.
In Liberia, 95 health workers have so far died from Ebola, and the National Health Workers Association has accused the government of not doing enough to protect them.
The association called the strike to demand a risk fee of $700 (£434) a month; it is currently less than $500 a month, on top of basic salaries of between $200-$300.
The association’s secretary-general George Williams said the government had pressured some health staff to report to work, but he was still assessing whether the call for a strike was effective.
Earlier, Liberia’s Assistant Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah said a strike would have negative consequences on those suffering from Ebola and would adversely affect progress made so far in the fight against the disease.
The government says the scale of the epidemic means it now cannot afford the risk fee originally agreed.
Liberia has about 50 doctors to serve the country’s 4.2 million people – an average of 0.1 doctor per 10,000 people, according to data compiled by the Afri-Dev.Info health and social development agency.
A new UN centre to co-ordinate the fight against the epidemic is being set up in Ghana and UN aid workers and logisticians are being flown to the capital, Accra.
Ghana has not been hit by Ebola.
Six months after the epidemic began in West Africa there are still only about a quarter of the treatment beds required to tackle it.
Food is now in short supply as markets are disrupted in some parts of the three countries worst affected: Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
In Liberia, elections have been postponed because the gathering of people at polling stations would endanger lives.
On Sunday evening, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that a female health worker had tested positive for Ebola in Dallas.
CDC chief Dr Tom Frieden has promised a full inquiry into how the transmission could have occurred.
The CDC investigation, he told reporters, would focus on possible breaches made during two “high-risk procedures”, dialysis and respiratory intubation.
The health worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital had been treating Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan, who caught the virus in his native Liberia and died on Wednesday.
(BBC)
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