As runaway Sierra Leonean patient dies in ambulance
One of Liberia’s most high-pro­file doctors has died of Ebola, a government official said yesterday, highlighting the risks facing health workers trying to combat the deadly disease.
Dr. Samuel Brisbane is the first Liberian doctor to die in an outbreak the World Health Organization said has killed 129 people in the country. A Ugandan doctor working in the country died earlier this month.
The WHO said the out­break, the largest ever record­ed, has also killed 319 people in Guinea and 224 in Sierra Leone. Brisbane, who once served as a medical adviser to former Liberian President Charles Taylor, was working as a consultant with the inter­nal medicine unit at the coun­try’s largest hospital, the John F. Kennedy Memorial Medical Center in Monrovia.
After falling ill with Ebola, he was taken to a treatment center on the outskirts of the capital, where he died, said Tolbert Nyenswah, an assis­tant health minister. Under the supervision of health workers, family members escorted the doctor’s body to a burial loca­tion west of the city, Nyenswah said.
He added that another doc­tor who had been working in Liberia’s central Bong County was also being treated for Eb­ola at the same center where Brisbane died. The situation “is getting more and more scary,” Nyenswah said.
In another development, a Sierra Leonean Ebola patient whose family sparked a na­tionwide hunt at the weekend when they forcefully removed her from a treatment center and took her to a traditional healer, died in an ambulance on the way to hospital, a health offi­cial said.
In recent days crowds gath­ered outside clinics and hospi­tals to protest against what they see as a conspiracy, in some cases clashing with police as they threatened to burn down the buildings and remove the patients.
Amadu Sisi, a senior doctor at King Harman hospital in the capital Freetown, from which the patient was taken, said at the weekend that police found her in the house of a healer. Her family refused to hand her over and a struggle ensued with po­lice, who finally retrieved her and sent her to hospital, he said.
“She died in the ambulance on the way to another hospi­tal,” Sisi said. Health officials said fear and mistrust of health workers in Sierra Leone, where many have more faith in tra­ditional medicine, are hinder­ing efforts to contain an Ebola outbreak which has killed more than 450 people in the country.

Ebola kills high-profile Liberian doctor