Ebola: Nigeria to send 591 health volunteers to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea

BASKING in the universal acclamation of Nigeria for setting the pace in the containment of the Ebola Viral Disease (EVD), the Federal Government’s decision to set up an international Ebola Volunteers group comes highly commended.

It is important that we make the most of this achievement by taking it forward to assist our neighbours in the sub-region, such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, which are suffering from a vicious pandemic that has clearly overwhelmed them.

At this juncture of this frightening emergency, it is no longer a question of whether Nigeria is benefiting commensurately from our unending sacrifices both within the region and the African continent as a whole. It is now a matter of meeting the Ebola challenge at its present ground zero and helping to overpower it there before another index case finds its way to our shores to threaten our population.

The single index case of Patrick Sawyer from Liberia claimed the lives of some of our best medical hands and threw panic into the populace.

According to the Minister of Health, Professor Onyebuchi Chukwu after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting last Wednesday, no less than 519 volunteers from the various arms of the medical services have already signed up at the three centres – Abuja, Lagos and Port Harcourt – where registers were opened. This is cheering news, compared to the period that Sawyer’s infection rocked the nation while medical doctors conveniently stayed on strike.

We must see the fight against Ebola as something akin to the various ECOMOG operations we have undertaken to salvage some of these countries from disintegration, except that this time, the war is on the medical front.

It is important, however, before our team of volunteers departs for these countries that a comprehensive memo of under-standing spelling out a code of conduct, especially by the locals, is agreed to. One of the reasons that we contained the disease while it went out of control in these countries was that we adopted a positive attitude and followed prescribed scientific procedures.

The various acts of indiscipline and barbarism exhibited, especially in Liberia and Sierra Leone, whereby corpses were abandoned on the streets, and mobs attacked medical personnel looking after stricken patients must not be allowed.

These countries and their citizens must submit totally to the dictates of international containment procedures. Otherwise, we must not allow our volunteers to plunge into an exercise in which their lives will be needlessly exposed to man-made dangers.