Ebola food shortage: Sufferer escapes Liberian hospital to steal bread from crowded market

Concerns over the shortage of food available for Ebola victims in West Africa have been put in the limelight by a YouTube video uploaded today.

 

It shows an Ebola patient walking through a crowded market after escaping from a hospital in Liberia. He picks up a piece of bread from one of the stalls and then lashes out at anyone who tries to confront him.

 

He wears a red t-shirt with a white tag on it – the mark of someone who has tested positive for the deadly Ebola virus. Some of the other people in the market follow him and try to talk to him, while others flee.

 

When health workers eventually surround him, he protests and is forced into the back of an ambulance before being driven away. 

Witnesses to the event, which took place in the capital Monrovia, said he was simply in search of food. He had been based at the Elwa hospital, whose Ebola unit is extremely overstretched. Locals said the hospital's patients complained that they were not being fed.

 

Liberia is the country to have suffered most at the hands of the epidemic, accounting for almost half of the deaths so far. 

 

Food shortages and price inflation have been caused by a ban on farmers tending to their crops. The rule is an attempt to stop the disease from spreading. 

 

The World Health Organisation said last week that the number of cases could hit 20,000 before the epidemic is brought under control.