Two die of Ebola in Mali in setback for that Country

By Caribbean Medical News Staff
Authorities in Mali have said that two people have died from Ebola.
For Mali, this is a setback as the country tries to keep Ebola from reaching the levels that currently ravage its sister states in West Africa.
Dead are a 25 yr old nurse from Bamako and a Guinean male who was so ill that he could not even give information or speak. According to reports from AP, the family was unable to give all the information required and the medical officials suspected Ebola.
“His family did not give us all the information that would have led us to suspect Ebola,” Dramane Maiga told The Associated Press.
These new Ebola cases and deaths are a setback at a time when Mali thought it had avoided the worst. Maiga charged that Government health officials “were slow to act”. Reports indicate that the nurse was hospitalized on a Saturday and no one had called the Ministry of Health until Monday morning. By the time officials arrived at the hospital, the young nurse was already dead.
Mali’s first case to come on the radar when a toddler was said to have been bleeding from the nose raising alarm bells. The child was travelling from Guinea to Mali with relatives by public transportation when en route to Kayes. The child died from Ebola. Reports indicate that another toddler was just released after going symptom free for 21 days.
Ebola is contracted by contact with the bodily fluids of a person infected with the virus and is not airborne. Nearly 5 000 people have died this year with the World Health Organization (WHO) saying that unless the international world intervened there could be as many as 1.4 million cases by January 2015.
Mali’s is on Guinea’s border and has been ravaged by Ebola along with Liberia and Sierra Leone. Nigeria was recently deemed to be “Ebola free”.