Entire country of Sierra Leone shut down: Three-day quarantine begins Saturday March 28,2015

 

Entire country of Sierra Leone shut down: Three-day quarantine begins in desperate attempt to curb new Ebola cases

Sierra Leone is being shut down for three days in a bid to stop a surge in cases of Ebola.

The country's six million population have been told that the curfew could eliminate the disease from the country. 

Thousands of teams will fan out around the country, knocking on doors to remind people how Ebola is spread and how to prevent it. In the hot spots — the regions around the capital and in the north — health workers will also search for Ebola cases.

Alfred Palo Conteh, the head of Sierra Leone's Ebola response, says a major goal of the campaign is to fight complacency, more than a year after the outbreak was declared in West Africa.

The country's president Ernest Koroma has ordered everybody to stay at home between now and Sunday in an effort to halt the spread of the killer disease. 

Sierra Leone had a previous nationwide curfew in September 2014 at the height of the epidemic. 

According to the World Health Organisation, there were 33 confirmed new cases of Ebola in Sierra Leone in the week of March 22,2015

The WHO said that that one-third of these cases were in the capital Freetown. 

As healthcare workers on the ground battle against the spread of the disease, two experimental vaccines against Ebola are now undergoing clinical trials in Liberia. 

A total of 600 people are being inoculated against the disease.