Ebola is creating a new epidemic of untreated illness and injury

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Wed, 2015-01-28 18:19 — mike kraft

PUBLC RADIO INTERNATIONAL Producer Leo Hornak Jan. 28, 2015

MONROVIA --Sharon McDonnell is seeing a new public health crisis unfold in West Africa: droves of patients without Ebola who are turned away from medical facilities.

The Maine-based epidemiologist, who is in Liberia with the International Rescue Committee, says things are much better now than they were two months ago when she first visited Liberia. The hospital where she is based, Redemption Hospital in New Kru Town, Liberia, has recently reopened after shutting down in October....

A taxi bringing a pregnant women with obstructed labor arrives at Redemption Hospital's "other" entrance for ambulance and inpatients. The Redemption hospital staff member came out in PPE (personal protective equipment) to talk with her and the family to make sure she could be seen in the hospital. Credit: Sharon McDonnell

McDonnell has recognized an overlooked consequence of the Ebola outbreak: Ignoring the welfare of people who are sick or injured from something other than Ebola. "For every Ebola case that's in the outbreak, there is a ten-times greater outbreak of [a] non-Ebola disease that was completely unable to be seen because the health facilities in the entire city were closed," McDonnell says.

Read complete story.
http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-01-28/ebola-creating-epidemic-untreated-illness-and-injury

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