MONROVIA, January 27 (LINA) - Representatives of Liberia, Sierra
Leone, Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire have started meeting in Freetown under
the Mano River Union (MRU) to agree on methods to control and prevent
disease outbreaks in the border areas.
The United Nations supports the initiative, according to Amadu Kamara,
Crisis Manager for the UN Mission Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) in
Sierra Leone.
Kamara told the gathering that included Ebola Response administrators,
medical officers, technical and operational planning experts from all
four countries that Ebola could not be defeated without "addressing
its regional dimensions."
The virus should be seen as "one epidemic with many fronts," he said.
Dubbed the "Sub-regional Ebola Technical Meeting on Border
Surveillance and Disease Control," participants hope to formulate
guidelines that will regulate how patients, corpses and laboratory
samples are transferred across borders.
Such guidelines will also focus on cross-border surveillance conduct
and contact tracing, according to an UNMEER release issued in Monrovia
Tuesday.
There is a UN mandate to support "efforts to rationalize resources,
provide the strategic framework for a regional approach, as well as to
ensure that our borders do not make it easy for the disease to
escape," stressed Kamara.
Recent figures by the World Health Organization show that transmission
rates are declining in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
The high-level meeting is sponsored by the African Development Bank (AfDB).
Sierra Leone’s Health Minister, Dr. Abubakarr Fofana, acknowledged
that prior to the Ebola outbreak, there was an "absence of a strong
and resilient health system."
He added that the unique nature of the disease, including its speed
of spread from rural to urban areas, made it initially difficult to
control. "We are now suffocating the virus; we are chasing it with
ferocity," he said.
All four MRU countries have a combined population of 45 million, of
which 2.2 million are said to be constantly moving across the borders.