Fatigue and fear hit staff on the Ebola front line in West Africa
Medecins sans Frontieres rotates foreign staff, but locals don't have option
Doctors, nurses and hospital workers fighting the Ebola epidemic in West Africa are struggling with a daily burden of exhaustion, shortage of staff and fear for themselves over the deadly virus, specialists say.
Containing an outbreak by a lethal pathogen places big demands on workers in any health system, but this is especially the case in one of the world's poorest regions, they say.
Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who codiscovered the Ebola virus in 1976, said health workers faced "their own fear of this epidemic, a fear that is grounded in reality. They're the front line."
"They often don't have the resources, they see colleagues dying, so I'm not surprised that some hospitals have been abandoned, basically," he said in an interview in London.
"Some nurses in some hospitals have gone on strike because there isn't minimum basic equipment for protecting both the hospital workers and the patients and their relatives."
"The health workers are tired," said Jean-Claude Manuguerra, a professor at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who spent two weeks at a hospital in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, which is the epicentre of the scare.