President apologises to Liberia’s health workers

Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has apologised for the high death toll among the country’s health workers, who have fought an ebola outbreak which has killed nearly 1,000 people in three countries.

Johnson Sirleaf pledged up to $18m (€13.4m) for the ebola fight, part of which will be given to health workers to help with insurance and death benefits, to fund more ambulances and to increase the number of treatment centres.

“If we haven’t done enough so far, I have come to apologise to you,” she told hundreds of health workers who gathered at Monrovia’s City Hall for a meeting with her government.

The West African ebola outbreak, centred on Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, is the worst in history. The World Health Organisation said on Friday it is an international health emergency that will likely continue spreading for months.

The disease has put a severe strain on the health systems of affected states and governments have responded with a range of measures, including the declaration of national emergencies in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria, which confirmed seven cases of ebola in Lagos.

Meanwhile, a Saudi man who died last week after returning from Sierra Leone did not have the ebola virus according to initial laboratory results, said Saudi Arabia’s health ministry.

The ministry said on Saturday that samples submitted to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came back negative for the ebola virus, adding that samples were also sent for testing to a laboratory in Germany.

The 40-year-old Saudi national died on Wednesday in a hospital isolation ward. He was the only suspected ebola case in the kingdom and had just returned from a trip to Sierra Leone.

Ebola, which has no proven vaccine or treatment, has killed more than 900 people this year in four countries in West Africa.

Saudi Arabia is not issuing visas this year to Muslim pilgrims from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea to avoid the spread of the virus during the hajj pilgrimage, which sees crowds of people from around the world gather in Mecca. The decision affects 7,400 pilgrims from those three countries.

Also yesterday, a patient being treated in a Toronto-area hospital in a suspected ebola case has tested negative for the virus, Ontario’s health ministry said.

The patient had recently travelled to Canada from Nigeria, where a state of emergency has been declared over the ebola outbreak. The patient was put in isolation after showing flu-like symptoms and fever.

“I can now confirm a recent case that underwent testing at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg was found to test negative for ebola virus disease,” Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins said.