Sierra Leone: Mothers Refuse to Vaccinate Children for Fear of Resurgent Ebola

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Wed, 2015-06-17 14:22 — mike kraft

BREITBART.COM by Frances Martel June 16, 2015

Doctors in Port Loko, a northwestern region of Sierra Leone outside Freetown, are reporting a significant drop in the number of mothers bringing their children to hospitals for routine vaccinations. The mothers, they say, fear exposing their children to a resurgent Ebola virus, and in keeping them from hospitals are risking triggering the spread of polio or measles.

Sierra Leone’s largest newspaper, the Awareness Times, cites the head of the region’s Health and Sanitation departments as sounding the alarm on families that appear to be sliding back to traditional ideas about Western medicine–namely, that it cannot be trusted. The official, Mohamed Sesay, tells the newspaper that “fear of Ebola has restricted women not to take their children to the vaccination center in Port Loko.” The vaccination program, run by UNICEF and the World Health Organization, is believed to be pivotal in eradicating diseases like polio and measles from the country.

The Awareness Times adds that this behavior is not just limited to vaccines, but that medical experts are finding patients generally refusing to visit medical professionals when suspecting that they have contracted a disease. “According to the information from the various centers a good number of patients don’t come to hospital when they are sick,” the newspaper reports.