FREETOWN – Authorities in Sierra Leone have imposed a two-week lockdown in the district of Kono after health workers uncovered a surge of Ebola infections in the area, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.
WHO said that the worst outbreak of Ebola on record has killed 6,533 people in the three West African countries most hit by the disease Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea and infected 18,118 people.
Sierra Leone, with a shortage of treatment centres and trained staff, had overtaken Liberia as the worst affected nation, and until now, the recent spread was believed to be centred on western areas around Freetown.
However, the WHO said that it had found bodies piled up at the only hospital in Kono, a district of about 350,000 people bordering Guinea.
Officials from the WHO, health ministry and U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) discovered that 87 bodies had been buried in 11 days.
Kono District Ebola Response Centre said it was placing the area on lockdown, allowing only essential vehicles in and out and introducing a night-time curfew.
Sierra Leone’s government said that it was working with the UN in Kono and the International Federation of the Red Cross in setting up a treatment centre there.
Meanwhile, the remote area has only one ambulance to transport the sick and blood samples for testing.
However, in Liberia, medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said it was withdrawing from northern Lofa County, a former Ebola
hotspot, after no new patients were recorded at its treatment centre in Foya. (Reuters/NAN)