EBOLA: Clashes erupt in Communitiy Quarantined by Liberian Government

Soldiers and police officers in riot gear blocked the roads. Even the waterfront was cordoned off, with the coast guard stopping residents from setting out in canoes. The entire neighborhood, a sprawling slum with tens of thousands of people, awoke Wednesday morning to find that it was under strict quarantine in the government’s halting fight against Ebola.

The reaction was swift and violent. Angry young men hurled rocks and stormed barbed-wire barricades, trying to break out. Soldiers repelled the surging crowd with live rounds, driving back hundreds of young men.

One teenager in the crowd, Shakie Kamara, 15, lay on the ground near the barricade, his right leg apparently wounded by a bullet from the melee. “Help me,” he pleaded, barefoot and wearing a green Philadelphia Eagles T-shirt.

“This is messed up,” said Lt. Col. Abraham Kromah, the head of operations for the national police, looking at the teenager and complaining about the crowd. “They injured one of my police officers. That’s not cool. It’s a group of criminals that did this. Look at this child. God in heaven help us.”

The clashes were a dangerous new chapter in West Africa’s five-month-old fight against the deadliest Ebola outbreak on record. The virus continues to spread, yet the total number of cases reported in the affected nations — Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone — is already higher than in all other Ebola outbreaks combined since 1976, when the disease was first identified, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.

So far, the outbreak has mostly been concentrated in rural areas, but the disease has also spread to major cities like the Guinean capital Conakry, and especially here in Monrovia, the Liberian capital. Fighting Ebola in an urban area — particularly in a neighborhood like this one, known as West Point, an extremely poor and often violent place that still bears deep scars from Liberia’s 14 years of civil war — presents challenges that the government and international aid organizations have only started grappling with.

The risks that Ebola will spread quickly, and the difficulties in containing it, are multiplied in a dense urban environment, especially one where the health system has largely collapsed and residents appear increasingly distrustful of the government’s approach to the crisis, experts say.

At least 1,350 people are estimated to have died in the current outbreak of Ebola, the first of its kind in West Africa. The deaths are rising most rapidly in Liberia, which now has the highest death toll, estimated to be at least 576.

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“Being the first time to get this problem, they didn’t know what they were dealing with,” Dr. David Kaggwa, a Ugandan physician working for the World Health Organization here, said of the Liberian government. “They didn’t know how to respond to it. By the time they realized, it was way out of control.”

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