From the Huffington Post: “Letter From Monrovia — Life in the Time of Ebola”
It’s both astounding and embarrassing as an American to observe the grossly uninformed hysteria in this country over the transfer to highly-controlled hospital isolation units in New York and Atlanta of two Americans with Ebola, while entire nations in West Africa are seemingly falling apart. Would that the same people who are terrified of the nonexistent threat Ebola poses to this country were as worried about the epidemic of type 2 diabetes, obesity, and the diseases of aging that threaten to overwhelm our health care system and economy,
Meanwhile, in the war- and poverty-ravaged nations of West Africa, Ebola is burning down the already skeletal health care infrastructures, and governments while the developed world fiddles in response. To get a sense of how bad the situation is, read this latest letter from Liberian Michael Weah, about whom I wrote last week:
Today is a sunny Sunday in Monrovia. About five major hospitals are closed and are gradually planning to reopen. Catholic hospital, one of the largest, was massively hit by the Ebola virus. A number of her staff including doctors were affected. The hospital chief administrator was the first to die. It is closed but there are still Ebola patients(nurses) on the wards and bodies in the morgue. The “rapid response unit” has been unable to transfer the patients because of lack of space at the only two over crowded official isolated centers in the whole country. Also, they claimed that they don’t have the vehicle to pick up the bodies from the morgue.
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