Cape Town - In a vivid sign of the danger posed by inadequate health provision, a man escaped from an Ebola quarantine centre in Monrovia and sent people fleeing in fear as he walked through a market in search of food, according to Reuters.
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The patient, who wore a tag showing he had tested positive for Ebola, held a stick and threw stones at a doctor from the centre in the Paynesville neighbourhood who stood at a distance and tried to persuade him to give himself up.
At one point, he stumbled and fell, apparently weakened by illness. Healthcare workers wearing protective clothing forced him into a medical vehicle and returned him to the facility.
Liberia and other West African countries are struggling to enforce quarantine zones to halt the spread of the deadly virus amid a pervasive fear and mistrust of authorities.
Many patients have fled their isolation wards in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and in one sealed-off neighbourhood in Liberia, security forces recently fired on residents who were protesting the quarantine.
International medical agency Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) said on Tuesday the world was "losing the battle" to contain Ebola as the United Nations warned of severe food shortages in the hardest-hit countries.
MSF told a UN briefing in New York that world leaders were failing to address the epidemic and called for an urgent global biological disaster response to get aid and personnel to west Africa.
More than 1 500 people have died from the Ebola outbreak, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). The United Nations warned on Tuesday that food prices were rising and that border closures were preventing people from getting supplies they needed.