The World Health Organization says that health workers such as doctors and nurses are at special risk for contracting the potentially-deadly virus, Ebola. It's not necessarily rooted to failed protective measures in hospitals. Health care workers are forming their own community, and when one of them gets sick and dies, he or she can infect co-workers and fellow medics.
Up to date, there are already 622 health-care workers have been infected and 346 have died in all countries affected by the outbreak. Apparently, Sierra Leone already has very few health care workers. Today, they only have 2,400 health care workers rendering their services to about 6 million people.
According to Dr. Peter Kilmarx of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "They can ill afford to lose health care workers." He was part of the team who investigated the high infection rate in Sierra Leone.
There are already ten doctors who have died from Ebola which include Dr. Martin Salia. He was not even treating Ebola patients. However, experts believe that he has been treating a patient with symptoms and he did not know he had the virus.
Dr. Kilmarx told NBC News, "We think of health care worker infections as a failure of personal protective equipment. But there are so many different ways that they are exposed there."
The doctors in Sierra Leone who are members of the Junior Doctors Association called a strike last Tuesday. According to them, they are not getting the proper care they should have when they got infected on the job.
The Ebola Virus Disease started its vast outbreak in West Africa last March this year and it already infected more than 17,000 people in the three severely-ravaged countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. According to the World Health Organization, the infection rate continues to rise in Sierra Leone. The death toll soars to up to 6,000 people.