Senegalese Health Minister Awa Coll-Seck (pictured) announced today at a press conference in Dakar the first Ebola case in her country. According to Jeune Afrique magazine, the person infected is an unnamed Guinean student who "disappeared" in Guinea three weeks ago. He was subsequently traced by Guinean health officials who accordingly informed their Senegalese counterparts.
This makes Senegal the fifth African country to be hit by the ebola virus in recent times after Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. A fever that has killed 13 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo recently is believed to be ebola but Congolese authorities say they have as yet no authoritative proof of that.
Senegal closed all land, sea and air borders with Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone a week ago but such closures do not seem to work as West African countries tend to have very porous borders with many unofficial or illegal crossing points normally used by smugglers and other criminals. There is speculation this first patient in Senegal entered the country by land. Dakar airport has a stringent processing mechanism of all passengers entering the country by air. Neighbouring Gambia also closed it’s borders with Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone as far back as March.
As ebola spreads in West Africa, ECOWAS, the regional body with headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria, called an extraordinary meeting of all west African health ministers who met yesterday in Ghana to discuss ways to contain the disease. Ghana itself has already started setting up precautionary measures to prevent the disease from entering its territory although it was agreed no West African country should close its borders at the Accra meeting; experts say that will only worsen the epidemic.
WHO officials and health experts have been jetting in and out of West Africa in the last couple of weeks meeting with presidents and health officials to see what they could do to help. They have also been able to see first hand the deplorable state of West African health facilities and clinics where things normally taken for granted in developed countries like gloves and syringes are in very limited supply.
In Sierra Leone, President Koroma spends many hours each day receiving financial and material donations from individuals, companies and organisations, both foreign and local. The response for his call for help after the virus forced a lock down of two major districts in the east of the country has been phenomenal. The President of the Gambia, Yaya Jammeh, recently donated half a million dollars to Sierra Leone to help in the fight against ebola.The Gambia is smaller than Sierra Leone and its main revenue earners are ground nuts (peanuts) and tourism. Its has a large Sierra Leonean population and many of its elites went to school in Sierra Leone.
Jammeh banned flights from Liberia and Sierra Leone in March but seems to have realized that the solution to the virus is not the banning of flights and closure of borders but collective efforts from all African states. Another African, the Rwandan president of the African Devlopment Bank, Donald Kaberuka, on a recent visit to Freetown said "Ebola has no passport." Or does not need one.
Meanwhile President Koroma has fired today his Health Minister, Miatta Kargbo, to be replaced by her deputy Dr. Abu Bakarr Fofanah, a medical doctor. Miatta was trained in Management Systems and worked in corporate America before returning home. She has a "black belt" in Management according to her resume.
The new Deputy Minister of Health is Madina Rahman who was a health adviser to President Koroma at State House. A professional nurse, Madina also owns a health clinic in New Jersey where she had lived for years before returning home to work at State House.
Miatta, with no experience and training in health administration, was clearly out of her depth when the ebola outbreak hit the country in May. Many people in and out of the country called for her resignation. Her removal as political head of the Health ministry is therefore not much of a surprise to most people in and out of the country. She has been recalled to State House where she was working before her appointment.
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