Liberia Ebola patients found as death toll surges

Liberia said on Tuesday it had found 17 Ebola patients who had fled an attack on their clinic, sparking a panicked manhunt across a city in the throes of a seemingly unstoppable epidemic. The World Health Organization, meanwhile, said the tropical virus had killed 84 people in just three days, a surge that has pushed the overall death toll from the west African outbreak to 1,229.

Liberia’s Information Minister Lewis Brown announced the return of the infected patients who had gone missing on Saturday after club-wielding youths raided a medical facility in a Monrovia slum.
Their disappearance had raised fears of a nightmare scenario of people with the highly contagious disease wandering the city where unburied corpses have lain abandoned in the streets. ‘All 17 patients who fled the Ebola centre have been accounted for,’ Brown told AFP. WHO statistics showed that Liberia bore the brunt of the latest surge in fatalities, with 53 deaths, while there were 17 in Sierra Leone and 14 in Guinea. But in a glimmer of possible good news, Brown said eight medical workers including two doctors who had been given experimental US-made drug ZMapp were responding to the treatment.