Ebola to shut down Sierra Leone

Volunteers to search homes for ill during 3-day lockdown

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone -- Shoppers in Sierra Leone rushed to stock up on food Thursday ahead of a three-day nationwide shutdown, during which the country's 6 million people will be confined to their homes while volunteers search house to house for Ebola victims in hiding and hand out soap in a desperate bid to slow the accelerating outbreak.

The disease sweeping West Africa also has touched Liberia, Guinea, Nigeria and Senegal and is believed to have sickened more than 5,300 people, the World Health Organization reported. More than 700 of those cases were recorded in the last week for which data are available.

Ebola is estimated to have killed more than 2,600 people, with most of the deaths in Liberia. But the WHO has said that the official toll is probably a gross underestimate and that most of the sick are at home, infecting others, when they should be in treatment centers.

At an emergency meeting Thursday, the United Nations Security Council called the outbreak "a threat to international peace and security" and unanimously urged all countries to provide health experts, field hospitals and medical supplies.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for a 20-fold increase in aid totaling almost $1 billion.

It was only the second time the council addressed a public health emergency, the first being the AIDS crisis.

During the lockdown, from midnight Thursday through Sunday, volunteers will try to identify sick people reluctant or unable to seek treatment. They will also hand out 1.5 million bars of soap and deliver information on how to prevent Ebola.

More than six months into the world's largest Ebola outbreak, there are still affected areas without access to soap and water, the WHO said.

Authorities have said they expect to discover hundreds of new cases during the shutdown. Many of those infected have not sought treatment out of fear that hospitals are merely places people go to die; others have been turned away by centers overwhelmed with patients.

Sierra Leone's government said it has prepared screening and treatment centers to accept the expected influx of patients after the shutdown.

As shoppers rushed to buy last-minute items, some merchants worried about how they would feed their own families after losing three days' income. Much of Sierra Leone's population lives on $2 a day or less, and making ends meet is a day-to-day struggle.

"If we do not sell here, we cannot eat," said Isatu Sesay, a vegetable seller in the capital. "We do not know how we will survive during the three-day shutdown."

Several countries have promised aid. France announced Thursday that it will set up a military hospital in Guinea in the coming days, and Britain said it will provide 500 more beds in Sierra Leone.

The U.S. plans to send 3,000 military personnel to the region and build more than a dozen treatment centers in Liberia. An American general has arrived in the Liberian capital of Monrovia to set up a command center.

Ebola, which is spread through bodily fluids, puts health workers at a particularly high risk. Nearly 320 have become infected, about half of which have died. A French nurse for Doctors Without Borders who became infected in Liberia was being flown to Paris on Thursday.

With no proven treatment for Ebola, public health experts have kept the focus on isolating the sick, tracking down those they have come into contact with, and stopping the chain of transmission through travel restrictions, the cordoning off of entire communities and now Sierra Leone's lockdown.

Confusion and fear about the disease and anger over some of these measures have sparked unrest.

In Guinea this week, a team that was doing disinfection and education on prevention methods was attacked by a group of young people and disappeared. Seven bodies were found Thursday, including health workers and three Guinean radio journalists who were covering the education efforts, Prime Minister Mohamed Said Fofana said.

To treat the disease, some patients have been given the blood of Ebola survivors in an experimental approach that some scientists think can help people fight off the virus.

British nurse William Pooley, who was infected while working in Sierra Leone and has since recovered, has flown to the U.S. to donate blood to an American patient, according to the British Foreign Office. The American was not identified.

On Wednesday, doctors in Nebraska said American aid worker Rick Sacra, who is being treated for Ebola in Omaha, is expected to make a full recovery. The medical team said Sacra was treated with an experimental drug for seven days and also received blood from someone who had battled the disease and recovered.

Information for this article was contributed by Maria Cheng, Lolita C. Baldor, Sarah DiLorenzo, Nicolas Garriga, Sylvie Corbet, Margery A. Beck and Boubacar Diallo of The Associated Press.

A Section on 09/19/2014

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