Infuriating – 72 Hours After U.S. Military Arrive To Assist – Liberia Healthcare Workers Go On Strike…
Posted on October 13, 2014 by sundance
We can’t begin to say how infuriating this is. Friday the first U.S. troops arrived in Monrovia to begin setting up aid for Liberian healthcare workers within the Ebola “Hot Zone”. Today those same healthcare workers go on strike.
“Beginning tomorrow we will be on a nationwide strike in every hospital and every health centre including ETUs (Ebola Treatment Units),” said Joseph Tamba, chairman of the health workers’ union.
There is NO DOUBT they have taken the opportunity of our U.S. arrival to remove themselves from the risk inherent in the care of Ebola patients. This will put additional pressure on our military to fill the caregiver void.
It has been a challenging pill to swallow to see 4,000 of our servicemen and women dispatched into a dangerous region on a humanitarian effort when little to no support is coming from Western “allies”. Add to that the pure selfishness of the Liberian opportunists which further endangers our troops, and the entire situation is beyond insufferable.
MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) — Six U.S. military planes arrived in the Ebola hot zone Thursday with more Marines, as West Africa’s leaders pleaded for the world’s help in dealing with a crisis that one called “a tragedy unforeseen in modern times.”
“Our people are dying,” Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma lamented by videoconference at a World Bank meeting in Washington. He said other countries are not responding fast enough while children are orphaned and infected doctors and nurses are lost to the disease.
Alpha Conde of Guinea said the region’s countries are in “a very fragile situation.”
Ebola is “an international threat and deserves an international response,” he said, speaking through a translator as he sought money, medicine, equipment and training for health care workers.
Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he was reminded of the start of the AIDS epidemic.
“We have to work now so this is not the next AIDS,” Frieden said. (link)
U.S. military monrovia ebola
Monrovia (AFP) - Healthcare workers in Liberia, the country hit hardest by the Ebola epidemic, will go on strike from Monday to demand hazard pay for treating patients infected with the deadly disease, their union leader said.
“Beginning tomorrow we will be on a nationwide strike in every hospital and every health centre including ETUs (Ebola Treatment Units),” said Joseph Tamba, chairman of the health workers’ union.
Staff at Monrovia’s Island Clinic, the largest government-run Ebola clinic in the capital, have already been on a “go slow” in recent days in their battle for extra pay — defying a request by health officials to avoid industrial action during the Ebola crisis, which has killed over 4,000 people in west Africa.
Dozens of patients in the clinic have died from Ebola since the go-slow began on Friday, said staff representative Alphonso Wesseh.
“We have slowed down our activities because the government refuses to satisfy our request. Last night tens of patients died,” he said.
Wesseh earlier this week told AFP that salaries in the sector were as low as $250 a month.
But government spokesman Isaac Jackson on Friday denied there was any disruption at the Island clinic opened by the World Health Organization in late September to combat the virus, which has claimed over 2,300 lives in Liberia this year. (read more)
http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2014/10/13/infuriating-72-hours-after-u-s-military-arrive-to-assist-liberia-healthcare-workers-go-on-strike/
