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A fifth doctor in Sierra Leone has died of Ebola, authorities said Monday, dealing another blow to efforts of keeping desperately needed health care workers safe in a country ravaged by the deadly disease.
Dr. Godfrey George, medical superintendent of Kambia Government Hospital in northern Sierra Leone, died overnight, according to Sierra Leone's government.
George had been driven to the capital, Freetown, after reporting that he was not feeling well. Doctors and nurses have been particularly vulnerable to contracting Ebola, a hemorrhagic fever, because the virus is spread through bodily fluids they routinely come in contact with.
News of George's death came one day after a report by the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI) said Ebola was spreading up to eight times faster in parts of the West African country than it was two months ago.
On average, 12 new cases a day were recorded in the rural areas surrounding Freetown in late October, compared with 1.3 cases in early September, the report said.
Transmission was also increasing rapidly in Freetown, the report said, with the average number of daily cases five times higher than two months ago.
The virus has killed nearly 5,000 people across West Africa.
"Whilst new cases appear to have slowed in Liberia, Ebola is continuing to spread frighteningly quickly in parts of Sierra Leone," said the AGI report.
The analysis was based on three-day averages of new cases recorded by Sierra Leone's Health Ministry.
The report comes after the United States envoy to the United Nations welcomed slowing infection rates in some areas and improved burial practices that lessen the risk of transmission.
The AGI, an initiative set up by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said that while the picture was changing, the situation was still "a full-blown crisis."
France said it was treating a U.N. employee who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone. France's government announced in a statement late Saturday that a U.N. employee had been evacuated there by a special flight and was undergoing treatment in "high-security isolation" in the Begin Army Training Hospital in St.-Mande, near Paris.
It didn't identify the patient or the U.N. agency where the patient works.
Doctors and nurses have been the most vulnerable to contracting Ebola, because the virus is spread through bodily fluids. Over 500 health workers have contracted Ebola, and about half of them have died.
The first cases of the current outbreak of Ebola were discovered in eastern Guinea in March. On Oct. 31, the World Health Organization (WHO) published revised figures showing 4,951 people have died of Ebola and 13,567 cases have been reported, mostly in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Duke University in North Carolina said Monday that a patient who was transported to its hospital on Sunday with a reported fever and after recent travel to West Africa tested negative for Ebola in preliminary lab screening.
Also on Sunday, Kaci Hickox, the U.S. nurse who challenged quarantining health care workers returning from treating West African Ebola patients, said she thought "an abundance of politics" lurked behind the restrictions.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie imposed a 21-day quarantine on Hickox on her return from Sierra Leone even though the federal government opposes such measures. Her case has come to highlight the dilemma over how to balance public health needs and personal liberties.
"When Gov. Christie stated that it was an abundance of caution, which is his reasoning for putting health care workers in a sort of quarantine for three weeks, it was really an abundance of politics," she said in an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press."
"And I think all of the scientific and medical and public health community agrees with me on that statement," said Hickox, who left New Jersey for her home in Maine last week.
Judge Charles C. LaVerdiere, the chief judge for the Maine District Courts, loosened restrictions on Hickox on Friday.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned on Monday against "unnecessarily" strict restrictions on the movement of health workers who have been fighting the deadly Ebola virus.
"The best way to stop this virus is to stop the virus at its source rather than limiting, restricting the movement of people or trade," he told a news conference in Vienna. "Particularly when there are some unnecessarily extra restrictions and discriminations against health workers."
"They are extraordinary people who are giving of themselves," Ban said. "They are risking their own lives."
Al Jazeera and wire services
Despite national stigma, health care workers in Sierra Leone are proud of their work and urge others to join front lines
Thousands of people have contracted Ebola since the mid-1970s, but this year’s outbreak is the largest on record
The virus has torn an already fragile society damaged from years of civil war
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