Liberian Ebola victim chased through streets after escaping treatment centre

Video has emerged of Liberian Ebola clinic workers dressed in contamination suits chasing an escaped patient through the streets after he left a treatment centre to visit a market. There were chaotic scenes as crowds followed the infected man, who was wearing a wristband to show he had tested positive for the disease, and some stallholders argued with him as he approached. The patient escaped from Monrovia’s Elwa hospital, which last month was so crowded with cases of the deadly disease that it had to turn people away.

The government needs to do more. Let Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf [the president of Liberia] do more.

Witness at the scene where the Ebola victim fled

Onlookers cheered as health workers arrived in their protective outfits to convince the patient to give himself up. The man, who showed no outward signs of the diarrhoea and bleeding that the virus causes, refused to return with the health workers, and they eventually grabbed him and carried him away to a waiting ambulance. The UN agency has warned that more than 20,000 people could be infected with Ebola before the outbreak comes to an end. There has been widespread panic buying, with a shortage of staple foods and severe prices in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, since movement restrictions were imposed to stop the spread of the virus.

Even prior to the Ebola outbreak, households in some of the affected areas were spending up to 80 per cent of their incomes on food.

Vincent Martin, Food Agriculture Organisation

Africa ebola