According to the latest report from the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health, 783 cases of Ebola have been confirmed in the country, 20 in Freetown alone.
Despite this, EMERGENCY's surgical centre and paediatric centre were the only fully functional health facilities in the area in and around the capital.
The local paediatric hospital, Ola During Children Hospital, is closed; the Connaught Hospital is operating erratically due to the absence of medical personnel, frightened by the spreading infection and afraid of catching the virus.
The latest official report from the World Health Organisation states that in the country 52 health operators have been infected by the Ebola virus and 28 of them are dead.
Private hospitals have been closed since last week: they are not prepared to handle the emergency and they are not legally required to stay open.
Because of the Ebola emergency, Sierra Leone's already very weak health system is collapsing. Suffering the consequences are the people who are unable to receive the care they need: malaria, typhus, infections and surgical emergencies continue to be a daily problem for the population which, however, is no longer able to find any kind of assistance in the public health facilities. In this serious emergency situation EMERGENCY continues to guarantee surgical and paediatric assistance, being the only point of reference in the city that is still operational.
"Yesterday afternoon we received a 2 year-old child who was unconscious due to cerebral malaria. We provided him with antimalarial treatment. Toward the evening, when he was finally hemodynamically stable, we decided to transfer him to the Ola During Children Hospital because our hospital was overflowing. When we arrived there we found the gates closed: we were told that there was no one there", explains Luca Rolla, Sierra Leone programme coordinator.
In order to guarantee care for the most children possible, the guestrooms normally reserved for patient family members have also been temporarily converted into a ward to increase the number of available beds.
The Military Hospital in Freetown has asked EMERGENCY to train the military on the use of personal protection devices to treat patients who are potentially infected with the virus. In fact, with the declaration of a state of emergency on 30 July Sierra Leone had decided to mobilise the military in order to guarantee observance of the safety procedures to prevent the spreading of Ebola.
From the beginning of the epidemic, EMERGENCY has quarantined 6 patients: fortunately none of them were found to be infected with the virus. In order to handle the risk of infection personnel take maximum care in using protection devices: in a surgical centre the risk of contact with biological fluids is extremely high. We have limited family visits and we have also set up two isolation tents where suspected cases can be kept.
EMERGENCY has been in Sierra Leone from 2001. Since then the Goderich Surgical Centre and Paediatric Centre, in the suburbs of the capital, have provided totally free care for about a half a million people.