A relation of one of the patients quarantined at the Lagos Ebola Centre has said that the Government is not fulfilling its responsibility to take care of those being watched for symptoms.
The relation who wanted to remain anonymous due to fear of victimization from authorities told PremiumTimes:
“Lagos State government said they are taking care of the Ebola patients. But you need to visit where they are. When you do you would find out that the place is a rundown infrastructure. It doesn’t have a decent toilet. Some of them are there getting malaria. How can you be treating one sickness and getting another? Family members are having to buy things like toiletries, detergents. We are buying bleach for them to wash hands.
“They’ve been kept in one ward and share the same toilet. What happens to WHO standard that says each patient should be separated from the other? If people know that the government is doing this I don’t think anybody would want to come down here to quarantine them. Government says some of them are recovering, why is it that those recovering are in the same room with everybody who is sick?” he asked.
He questioned what the money released for the treatment by the government is being used for when the facility andpatients lack all basic essentials.
“Government says they are releasing money. Very soon we would here that they spend so much billions during Ebola crisis but we are here and there is nothing on ground.” Last Friday, the Special Adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan on Media, Reuben Abati, said the President has ordered the immediate release of N1.9 billion “to execute a special intervention plan to tackle the Ebola outbreak.”
The relative said though the patients were separated according to sex on Thursday, the facilities in the new wards are nothing better than the old ward.
“You would expect that having used an emergency place that was dilapidated when using a new infrastructure it would be uptight and everything would be there but now again it’s going to be another big room and there is everybody there. When you wake up in the morning and somebody sitting beside you died, who would that help them to recover?
“They are seeing people they used to know dying left, right, and centre, someone died today and he died in the presence of other people and you expect them to recover? Someone should throw light about this so that government can wake up and discover how things are done. I read countless articles in the paper that everything is fine. Nothing is fine.”