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African Union says efforts to stop Ebola are creating sense of siege
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ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – Border closures, flight bans and mass quarantines are creating a sense of siege in the West African countries affected by Ebola, officials at an emergency African Union meeting said Monday, as Senegal agreed to allow humanitarian aid pass through its closed borders.
The largest Ebola outbreak ever has killed more than 2,000 people and public health officials say it is out of control. But they have criticized some of the more extreme efforts to slow the disease’s spread, saying that border closures have hampered the response by holding up shipments of aid.
They have also noted that, in a highly mobile region like West Africa with several unofficial border crossings, closing frontiers is usually ineffective. The current Ebola outbreak began in Guinea and quickly spread across the border into Liberia and Sierra Leone. More recently, a sick Liberian-American man flew to Nigeria, infecting several people, and a Guinean student with the disease took a bus to Senegal, the first and only case recorded there.
http://metronews.ca/
By Elias Meseret And Babacar Dione
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