WOMAN DIES, AFTER 4 HOSPITALS REJECTS HER

Ekiti State Government yesterday debunked rumours of an outbreak of the deadly Ebola Virus Disease, EVD, in the state and cautioned against creating unjustifiable panic through indiscriminate spreading of unsubstantiated rumours about spurious cases of Ebola.

This came as the government lamented the unfortunate death of a woman, who was said to have vomited and collapsed in premises of the State Ministry of Health and was rejected in four different private hospitals because of the text messages circulated by some unidentified people suspected to be in the Healthcare sector that tagged her Ebola patient.

At a briefing, Commissioner for Health, Professor Olusola Fasubaa assured that there was no known case of the disease in the state and warned that sending callous messages through the Short Message Service (SMS) could lead to avoidable death of innocent and non-Ebola patients.

The Commissioner said a similar case at the NYSC Orientation camp in Ise Ekiti where a young man who had been inadequately treated for malaria collapsed and was abandoned by everybody including the camp’s healthcare givers from 6am to 3pm when the state government intervened. Fasubaa, who explained that the National laboratory in Lagos had declared the blood of the young man Ebola-free, stressed that the patient was fortunate to be alive, saying he could have died from non-attention by the healthcare givers.

He emphasised that to establish a suspected case of Ebola, the person must have travelled to an infectious area or had contact with an infected individual, and after 2-21 days of that contact would develop the symptoms of fever, intense weakness, bone and muscular pains, which would later progress to vomiting, diarrhea and organ damage.

Prof Fasubaa appealed to doctors in the state to live up to their responsibilities and remember the Hippocratic oath they swore to. He stressed that not all patients that have fever or vomiting have Ebola. Narrating the pathetic story of the dead health worker, who was a staff of the Comprehensive Health Centre, Ogotun, the commissioner said “On 20th August,2014, a 55-year-old health care worker at Ogotun- Ekiti, who was said not to have had any complaints of illness in the last two months and no current history of travel outside the state (according to her neighbours) got to the Data Bank of the Ministry of Health at about 1.pm and collapsed after coughing out blood and subsequently vomited and she was immediately tagged Ebola victim without an adequate history taken and people started running away.

“The woman subsequently died in the late evening. The unnecessary write-up through the social media by some doctors in the state is uncalled for, and counter-productive to the efforts of the state government in containing and curtailing the spread of the virus.”