Sunday Times 2
West Africa seeks to seal off Ebola-hit regions
View(s):CONAKRY, Aug 2 (AFP) -West Africa’s Ebola-hit nations have agreed to impose a cross-border isolation zone at the epicentre of the world’s worst-ever outbreak, amid warnings that the deadly epidemic is spiralling out of control.
Samaritan's Purse medical personnel transport a person who died from the Ebola virus in Liberia (REUTERS)
The announcement came at an emergency summit in the Guinean capital on Friday to discuss the outbreak, which has killed more than 700 people, with the World Health Organization warning Ebola could cause “catastrophic” loss of life and severe economic disruption if it continued to spread.
“We have agreed to take important and extraordinary actions at the inter-country level to focus on cross-border regions that have more than 70 percent of the epidemic,” said Hadja Saran Darab, the secretary-general of the Mano River Union bloc grouping the nations.
“These areas will be isolated by police and military. The people in these areas being isolated will be provided with material support,” she said at the meeting in Conakry.
Opening the summit, WHO chief Margaret Chan told leaders that the response of the three countries to the epidemic had been “woefully inadequate”, revealing that the outbreak was “moving faster than our efforts to control it”.