Leave a Comment
The Lagos State Government has commenced an
intensive search for 27 secondary contacts, who
might have had contacts with doctors, nurses
and health workers, who attended to the late
Liberian-American Patrick Sawyer, at a Lagos
private hospital.
Sawyer, who was infected with the deadly Ebola
virus in his native Liberia, died in the Obalende,
Lagos-based hospital penultimate Friday, four
days after he was admitted to the hospital.
The 40-year-old Sawyer was in Nigeria to attend
a conference in Calabar, Cross River State.
Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Dr. Jide
Idris, who spoke in Lagos on Wednesday, said
the government was also planning a life insurance
cover for doctors and other health
professionals, who volunteered to work with
experts monitoring and testing suspected cases
of the Ebola Virus Disease.
Idris, who spoke at a press briefing, said the
government was presently facing a shortage of
experts, doctors and health workers needed to
attend to those that had been infected and those
that were going to be isolated for monitoring.
He said, “We will provide a life insurance for any
doctor, nurse and other experts that want to
work with isolated patients. We need more
hands, because we have moved from the stage
of primary contacts to secondary contacts.
“We are tracing all the people that had contact,
not just with (the late) Sawyer, but those that
had contacts with the health workers and others
that have died.
“We have identified 27 secondary contacts
already, we tracing the addresses of others.
“It is a tedious task, because we will also be
taking their blood samples for testing and we will
be monitoring them.
“We are appealing to the doctors on strike to
resume work and set aside their grievances. No
doubt, this situation is a dire emergency and our
health professionals must recognise that.
“It will be morally unjustifiable for us to call for
help from the international community if our own
experts and doctors are not working.
“The bottom line is that we cannot provide the
requisite expertise needed to manage these
confirmed and probable cases.”
Idris said it would also be evacuating
tuberculosis patients at the Infectious Diseases
Hospital in Yaba, Lagos, to another hospital to
accommodate more suspected and isolated cases.
The commissioner said, “The TB patients at
Mainland Hospital were protesting this morning
but we appealed to them, that if they stay there
they might be exposed and get infected.
“If we need to evacuate any hospital to ensure
that we contain this disease, we will do it. If we
have to take suspected cases to LASUTH, we
will do it. If we need to take decisions that will
be inconvenient for some people but beneficial to
the larger population, we will do it. Ebola is a
highly infectious disease. We will do it to contain
it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment