3 doctors, 28 nurses placed under quarantine as new cases crop up

3 doctors and 28 nurses have been quarantined in Sierra Leone after a mother tested positive for Ebola after giving birth.

Reports say doctors were unable to stem the woman’s bleeding and she was transferred to an emergency ward at the Princess Christian Maternity Hospital, where she tested positive for the deadly virus on Saturday.

According to the health ministry spokesman Jonathan Abass Kamara,

“All the health workers as well as the baby are now quarantine and will be there for observation for 21 days,”

He added that none of those in quarantine had shown any symptoms of Ebola.

The National Ebola Response Centre (NERC) said the woman was one of 3 new cases registered over the past week in the densely-populated coastal slum of Magazine Wharf.

This would be the first infections for weeks in Freetown.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said in its latest update on the epidemic on Wednesday that weekly case incidence had stalled at between 20 and 27 in Guinea and Sierra Leone since the end of May.

The body further said the outbreak is not under control as new cases were continuing to “arise from unknown sources of infection, and to be detected only after post-mortem testing of community deaths,”

The Ebola outbreak has seen 27,443 infections in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, of which 11,207 have been fatal, while the number of health workers infected stands at 872, of whom 507 have died.

Sierra Leone has seen almost half of the total caseload, reporting more than 3,900 deaths.