Ebola deaths in Liberia are ‘far higher than reported’ as officials downplay epidemic

The true death toll from the Ebola epidemic is being masked by chaotic data collection and people’s reluctance to admit that their loved ones had the virus, according to one of west Africa’s most celebrated film-makers.

Sorious Samura, who has just returned from making a documentary on the crisis in Liberia, said it is very clear on the ground that the true number of dead is far higher than the official figures being reported by the World Health Organisation.

Liberia accounts for more than half of all the official Ebola deaths, with a total of 2,458. Overall, the number of dead across Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea has exceeded 4,500.

Samura, a television journalist originally from Sierra Leone, said the Liberian authorities appeared to be deliberately downplaying the true number of cases, for fear of increasing alarm in the west African country.

He said another striking feature was that the ineffectiveness of years of aid had been laid bare: “Money has poured in from the west, but it has gone to waste. Ebola should make us think about how the west gives aid to Africa; aid has not been used to create a system able to cope with this challenge. Ebola has exposed the fact it is not working. That money has gone to waste.”

A committee of MPs recently criticised the Department for International Development and the EU for failing to address the problem of aid being misappropriated. It said just £2.4m of £37m of aid had actually made its way to Liberia’s health ministry.

Meat strips dried in a box with a light bulb? That’s the best they can do.....

What do you expect from a bunch of freed slaves that have been handed to them over the years everything they want and always want more.

Sticking their hand out always never trying to achieve on their own.

Then you get a few self righteous blacks that think they can holler loud “in a can” and whitey will give them more.

Wait, are we talking about America or Liberia.....lost my train of thought here....sorry they run together.

The world needs to quarantine the entire area and let the disease burn itself out.
I know it sounds inhumane, but this is a very dangerous plague.

No, it simply won't work. If your cat has rabies, they don't quarantine the neighborhood and shoot all outgoing cats, raccoons, etc. The disease would have burned itself out already just like previous times it escaped from the reservoir except for the incredibly primitive and ignorant people taking acute patients to the hospital in taxis, the people washing bodies at home, the people doing home burials, the village that murdered the ebola tracing team.

Contrary to the oft-repeated myth, Ebola is hard to catch if the victim is not acute. Therefore the correct way to handle the epidemic is to find the acute victims and get them into isolated treatment centers. Part of that strategy is to cordon off areas. That is not to quarantine and burn out as you suggest but just another way to find the acute cases and remove them at the time they are able to spread.

They tried your method once (West Point slum). It failed. What happened instead of burning out, it remained endemic, a case here and a case there. In other words it became a human reservoir. That is a much worse situation than opening the slum, finding the acute cases and removing them and that is what they started doing now. Unfortunately all the treatment centers are full and they are short on staff to find and track cases. But that is a different and solvable problem.

When in the Philippines, my scout troop ( BSA Far East Council) had the Negritos teaching Jungle survival come to one of our camp outs on Bataan within the Subic complex.

They were very adept. They snuck up on the fruit bat colonies that lived in the jungle trees and brought them down with sling shots. The bat was cleaned and the meat removed from the bones and chopped in fairly small pieces.

They then took a section of bamboo that had the joints on each end. about 3 “ in diameter. Near each end they cut a slant into the circumference and then slit along the length on both sides. This made a panel that slid out. Into the cavity they put some water, some salt, some rice and some fruit bat meat. They then made a small hole in the slide out lid.

The whole thing was put into the fire. It was a pressure cooker. The rice and bat meat were cooked perfectly and the bamboo didn’t burt

American Soldiers, just another target group to hate for Obola.

Please call congress and tell them that we must be deadly serious about containing Ebola by strict quarantine within the United States and from infected nations. This is our right and our duty and it is THEIR duty to protect US.

Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121 or Google your congressman or senator and get his contact information and call him / her office directly. You can also call or go to their local offices.

I believe decisive response is urgent because you can’t put this Ebola genie back in the bottle once it gets out. It is a fire, it consumes all the fuel it can get and the fuel is people. The only way to stop a fire is to block it from the fuel or cool it with water. A vaccine or medicine to treat Ebola would be the water and we don’t have reliable, enough or any.

Every possible measure must be taken to stop the spread before draconian measures are imposed. What is being done now is sloppy. We are walking a dangerous road. The threat is blossoming by the day if not hour. Almost every hour there is some new Ebola development and none of them are good. This is a serious and potentially deadly event. Unchecked it could destroy or weaken the United States and facilitate our destruction by others. It has that potential for every country and that is why so many are responding with such strict quarantines. These consequences, no matter how small the probabilities, demand a full effort and significant response.

Ebola is being spread here in the United States right now. First Texas, then Ohio then? Terror is an excellent weapon. It disrupts, confuses, paralyzes and destroys a society. Many others and we on FR have speculated that terrorists may spread Ebola. How do you that remember 9/11 feel right now compared to what you felt then? Do you want to gather your loved ones near you to protect them? I do. Even more than I did on September 11, 2001! Isn’t this passive response by this administration accomplishing the very same things a terrorist would want?
When something is being done that makes as little sense as what Obama is doing there has to be some other reason. I leave it to you dear reader to draw your own conclusions as to the reasons.
What is happening now is insane. It makes no sense at all. For example the head of CDC says: “Stopping travel from Africa won’t do any good because you have to get people into Africa to fight Ebola.” “You can’t get Ebola from an infected person on a bus but an infected person should never be on a bus because he can infect others.” “Blocking travel from infected countries would damage their fragile economies.” What about ours? What about our safety? What about resources we have paid for that should be protecting us?

Even the most despotic dictatorship in Africa has acted to protect his nation by strict quarantine and stopping travel from infected countries. Even CDC, the UN and WHO advocate and credit strict quarantine for nipping the spread of Ebola in the bud at the source in places like Senegal and Nigeria where both have had faster and more successful outbreak controls than we have had here. 35 countries have stopped travel of people from infected West African countries. It is so obvious even a child could understand it so why is it OK for people from infected countries to travel here?
I will post this message and keep posting it until someone stops me.

For further reference:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3216461/posts

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