President Ernest Bai Koroma of Sierra Leone has accused international aid organisations of inflating Ebola casualty figures in his country in order to attract funding.
“If we go by the reports we are hearing, by the end of the year, nobody will remain,” Koroma said, while maintaining that the non-governmental organisations were delibrately giving the impression that the disease was more widespread that it really was.
Koroma made this known at a meeting with United National (UN) officials on Friday, October 10, 2014, according to the African Review.
The president’s allegations comes on the heels of those made by a minister in the country earlier. Theo Nicol, deputy minister of Information and Communication in the country had told journalists that the number of cases and the death toll were being manipulated because “the bigger the funding for international NGOs”.
Nicol also accused Western media of casting the country in bad light by only telling negative stories and ignoring the successes.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation Friday announced that the death toll for the deadliest Ebola epidemic in human history has surpassed 4,000.
WHO says that as at October 8, 2014 4,033 people have died and 8,399 cases have been recorded in seven countries – Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Senegal, Nigeria, Spain and the United States of America.
UN special envoy on Ebola David Nabarro, told the UN General Assembly on Friday that the number of people contracting the disease could probably be doubling every three-to-four weeks, and warned the response needed to be 20 times greater than it was at the beginning of the month.
Nabaroo warned that the cases in West Africa could grow by another 10,000 by end of next month.
