Liberia health workers strike over Ebola pay amid jitters

MONROVIA
Health workers across Liberia went on strike Monday to demand danger money to care for the sick at the heart of a raging Ebola epidemic that has already killed dozens of their colleagues.

Doctors, nurses and carers in west Africa are on the frontline of the worst-ever outbreak of Ebola, which has killed more than 4,000 people, mostly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and the hardest-hit, Liberia.

The Liberian walkout came as US authorities scrambled to find out how a Texan healthcare worker contracted the tropical virus, in the first case of contamination on US soil and the second outside Africa.

As the new US case fuelled global jitters, EU ministers called a meeting for Thursday to discuss screening travellers from Ebola-hit west Africa, in line with steps taken by Britain, the United States and Canada.

95 DEAD

The chairman of the Liberian health workers’ union, Joseph Tamba, said his strike call had been “massively” followed.

“Health workers across the country have downed tools as we asked them to do,” Mr Tamba told AFP. In the capital Monrovia, where staff at Island Clinic, the largest government-run Ebola facility, have been on a “go slow” for three days, a patient quoted on local radio described scenes of desolation with the sick deserted by staff.

“We are at the Ebola Treatment Unit and no one is taking care of us,” the unnamed man said. “Last night several patients died. Those who can walk are trying to escape by climbing over the fence.” Journalists have been banned from Liberia’s Ebola clinics, making the situation on the ground difficult to ascertain.

95 Liberian health workers have died so far in the epidemic, and their surviving colleagues want pay commensurate to the acute risk of dealing with Ebola, which spreads through contact with bodily fluids and for which there is no vaccine or widely-available treatment.

Danger money aside, Mr Tamba said many workers were not even being paid their regular wage to combat an epidemic that has killed more than 2,300 in Liberia and overwhelmed its skeletal health service.

EBOLA VACCINE
He said that at the Island Clinic — which is backed by the World Health Organization — staff were promised a monthly wage of $750 (595 euros) for nurses and lab technicians, and $500 for other carers, but they have received a third less.

Meanwhile, an experimental Ebola vaccine developed in Canada will be tested on humans, in hopes of eventually rolling it out to fight the outbreak in West Africa, Health Minister Rona Ambrose said Monday.

In a first phase of clinical trials, the vaccine will be administered to twenty volunteers at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, in the United States, to test dosage, effectiveness and any side effects.

Initial results from the vaccine, VSV-EBOV, developed by researchers at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, will be available in December, Ambrose told a news conference in Calgary.

Ambrose said she hoped “advancing research on this experimental vaccine will be able to help address this global crisis.”

In August, Canada gave nearly 1,000 doses of the vaccine to the World Health Organization, but they remain in Winnipeg and the WHO has not decided whether or not to use them.

Ambrose said Monday that the clinical trials “are an important step in addressing some of the ethical considerations around providing an experimental vaccine to assist in controlling the outbreak.”

So far, the Ebola epidemic has claimed more than 4,000 lives this year out of more than 7,300 infected, mainly in the West African nations of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.