UPROAR AS TB HOSPITAL MADE EBOLA CENTRE

MANZINI – The National TB Hospital, which is currently battling with severe Tubercolosis strains, has been identified as the facility that will house Ebola patients.

The decision to make the hospital an Ebola Centre, should the virus hit Swaziland, has been met with protests from staff and some Manzini residents because they strongly feel the Ministry of Health should have identified another location.

The TB hospital, situated at Moneni, Manzini, is faced with growing health challenges since it started operating, with claims that staff members were not properly protected from contracting TB. The workers’ fear is that Ebola presents an entirely new challenge for a health facility that has, over the years, been failing to contain the spread of TB.

The hospital currently has a challenge of coping with patients suffering from Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR TB) and a complicated normal TB and Extra Drug Resistant TB (XDR TB), which is a complication of MDR TB.
Manzini is regarded as Swaziland’s most densely populated city.

An inside source, who preferred to remain anonymous, said the Ministry of Health’s Ebola task team visited the hospital on Tuesday, where it conducted an inspection on the unfinished part of the facility.

The source said on Wednesday, the team that was led by the ministry’s Director of Health Services, Vusi Magagula, showed up again at the hospital where it met with the facility’s staff members.

In their meeting with the staff members, the team told the workers that the hospital had been identified as the centre to treat Ebola patients, should the deadly virus reach the country.
The Ebola task team also told the hospital’s staff members that tents would be mounted and part of the unfinished structures of the facility would be used to treat patients with the deadly virus.

The staff members were also told that there would be volunteers, who were yet to be trained on how to treat Ebola patients.
“We were told that government would purchase tents to be pitched in the open space (playing ground) within the facility and the authentic gear to be worn by the volunteers was still to be purchased as currently the only available apparel were the H1N1 masks.

They said they would use the tents and complete the unfinished portion of the hospital to be part of the Ebola treatment centre,” the source said. 
The source further said the task team promised the National TB Hospital workers that they would receive incentives despite that they would not work in the centre to be established within the hospital.

“The Ebola task team promised us that event though we will not be the ones working where the deadly disease will be treated, we will receive incentives.” 
According to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention official website, the first Ebola cases were reported in March this year but the deadly virus has, in a couple of months, killed an estimated 4 922 people. In previous reports, it was reported that the Ministry of Health was monitoring an undisclosed number of people in the country to establish if they had contracted the virus or not.

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