Questions over Mali's ebola response

IRIN: The failure of a top Malian hospital to detect probable cases of Ebola has raised questions about whether the country's health system is sufficiently prepared to tackle the disease.

"We have several confirmed cases," Samba Sow, head of the Mali's National Centre for Disease Control (CNAM), told IRIN. "Our goal is to prevent the virus from spreading." But the government only released an Ebola emergency plan on 30 October, a week after the first Ebola case.

In Kayes, where a two-year-old girl tested positive for Ebola on 23 October, the hospital was caught off-guard. Only two of its 160 workers had received training on how to detect and treat Ebola patients and how to protect themselves while doing so, said hospital director Toumani Konaré. "The staff had the right protective gear, but they didn't know how to use it," he told IRIN.

Before the current outbreak in Mali, the World Health Organization (WHO) had categorized the country as at-risk, due to its long border and strong economic ties with Guinea, where the epidemic began. It was targeted as a country to receive technical assistance, including training on infection prevention, epidemiological surveillance and contact tracing.

Sow said preparations started in April. However, those preparations were focused mostly on the 805km border that Mali shares with Guinea. The government started to send a few health workers to check travellers for fever and other signs of the virus among the chaos of trucks, buses, bush taxis and motorbikes at border checkpoints.

The Ministry of Health says the Kouremalé border checkpoint, where an imam who died of Ebola in Mali on 27 October had entered from Guinea, checks more than 1,000 people and 150 vehicles per day....