An escaped ebola patient sparked panic by walking through a crowded market in the Liberian capital in search of food, even as terrified residents screamed at him to keep away.
With a white medical tag on his wrist indicating that he had tested positive for the disease, stallholders and shoppers in Monrovia fled or yelled at the man as he passed among them, at times carrying a large stick or what appeared to be a rock for protection.
The man, dressed in shorts and a red shirt, was eventually confronted by health workers who arrived wearing protective clothing, but he resisted their attempts to persuade him to get into an ambulance.
They surrounded the patient and sprayed him with disinfectant, then grappled him to the floor and manhandled him into a vehicle as he fought to escape. He showed no apparent physical symptoms of the disease.
The episode, which occurred on Monday and was captured on video, reflects the difficulties the authorities face in trying to contain the world’s deadliest outbreak of the virus. The patient appears to have fled the nearby Elwa hospital ebola treatment unit, which is run by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
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The medical charity called yesterday for a global military intervention to curb the outbreak, saying that the world’s response so far had been “lethally inadequate”.
More than 1,550 people have died since the epidemic started in Guinea earlier this year. At least 3,000 have been infected with the virus but the World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that more than 20,000 are likely to be infected. The international president of MSF, Joanne Liu, told the United Nations in a speech that calls for help had been ignored.
“Six months into the worst ebola epidemic in history, the world is losing the battle to contain it. The clock is ticking and ebola is winning,” she said.
“The time for meetings and planning is over. It is now time to act. Every day of inaction means more deaths and the slow collapse of societies. Leaders are failing to come to grips with this transnational threat. States have essentially joined a global coalition of inaction.”
MSF said that military and civilian teams capable of dealing with a biological disaster were needed immediately, because the spread of the disease “will not be prevented without a massive deployment”.
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Food is becoming a pressing concern in the wider region, as farmers in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea — the three countries suffering the worst outbreaks — are due to begin harvesting their rice and maize in the next few weeks, but could be prevented from doing so by the restrictions on movement that their governments have imposed.
Food prices have already risen sharply, particularly in urban areas. For example, the cost of the common staple cassava in a Monrovian market has risen by 150 per cent in the past few weeks, making it unaffordable for many families in the poverty-stricken region. Even before ebola struck, some households were spending 80 per cent of their income on food.
Shukri Ahmed, a senior economist at the Food and Agriculture Organisation, said that the problem was unprecedented, and mainly a logistical one, because labourers who usually helped farmers to harvest were not allowed to move around, and traders could not reach farms to buy the crops.
“We have been involved in drought, floods, conflict, people losing everything they have. But those situations allow you to move. The problem is how to move around.”
He warned that if ebola was not brought under control soon, the food shortage would be “very grave”, with long-term consequences for those countries that have only recently emerged from years of civil war and misrule.
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Before the outbreak, Sierra Leone was, he said, nearing food self-sufficiency, and the other two countries were able to import what they needed.
At least 31 people have died in the what the WHO said was an unrelated outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.