Vol. 78/No. 44 December 8, 2014
It seems Báez, who remains in stable condition, may have contracted Ebola because he allowed his compassion to impinge on adherence to safety protocol. His family was told he contracted the virus after instinctively helping a patient who was falling down, reported ABC News. A similar “weakness” may have led to the death of Salia. The U.S. government billed his widow $200,000 for transport costs.
Salia, who for years had taken part in medical missions in Africa, worked at several hospitals in Sierra Leone. The United Methodist Great Plains Conference is raising money to help cover the bill.
The Cuban government, which has more than 50,000 medical workers in more than 60 countries, has sent 256 doctors and nurses recruited from 15,000 volunteers to Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, where the majority of the more than 15,000 Ebola cases have been identified. The reported death toll as of Nov. 18 was 5,459.
“We are ordinary people educated under principles of humanism, altruism and internationalism,” Ronald Hernández Torres, a Cuban doctor serving in Liberia, said in an interview published Nov. 19 on the Cubadebate website.
Báez’s condition is the subject of daily articles in Granma, the newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party. “Millions of Cubans are at his bedside” was the headline of a Nov. 19 article on messages of support the Cuban doctor is receiving.
U.S. troops are on course to complete 13 Ebola treatment centers in Liberia by the end of November. But Washington provides staff at just one clinic, which is strictly for treatment of medical personnel.
The World Health Organization announced Nov. 21 that the rate of transmission of the virus remains intense in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea-Conakry, the three countries at the center of the epidemic. Several new cases were reported in neighboring Mali Nov. 22, where five people have died of the disease.
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