Bad leadership hampers Ebola fight in W’Africa -MsF

of Medecins sans Frontieres, Joanne Liu, has said that efforts to curb the spread of Ebola virus in West African states are being undermined by a lack of leadership and emergency management skills.
She said on Friday in Geneva, after 10 days in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone that Western nations must dispatch more experts in tropical medicine, especially field workers who know how to help communities prevent the often lethal virus from spreading.
Liu said WHO must fulfill its leading role in coordinating the international response to the epidemic.
“I think they are in the process of bringing more people from the WHO but the reality is that this epidemic will not be contained unless there are more players.
“We are missing everything right now; we are missing a strong leadership centrally, with core nation capacity and disease emergency management skills. It’s not happening,’’ she said.

She said MSF (Doctors Without Borders) has deployed 1,000 of its own staff in the stricken region, running centres that currently have 300 beds.
“All of our centres are overcrowded right now, we have an Ebola centre in Lofa county in Foya (Liberia) which is close to the epicentre, it is meant to be a centre with a capacity of 20 beds. We have more than 125 patients right now,”she said.
“Our centre in Monrovia, opened only last weekend, with 125 beds is filled, and we’re entertaining the idea of increasing the capacity, if not doubling it,” she added.
Liu said right now, there is state of global fear in Liberia.
“It’s paramount now to re-establish access to basic health care. Because we might be facing the ridiculous situation of having people dying more of non-Ebola pathologies than from Ebola,’’she said.
“Right now in Monrovia for example, if you have malaria, nobody knows where to go and consult for health care,” she added.
Liu said this week alone six pregnant women ended up walking for hours in the city trying to find a place to deliver and by the time they got to our centre, which was not the right place to be, the babies had died in their womb.
“I find this identifies very well what we are facing in terms of having a health care system being collapsed from the Ebola epidemic,”she said.
Liu said Western and African experts are needed to help with education to prevent spread of Ebola, trace contacts of infected people, and care for those in isolation wards.
She said the U.S. Centre for Disease Control is sending some 55 epidemiologists to Liberia, but more are needed because of the situation on ground