Two doctors for an entire county? A frightening look at Liberia's understaffed medical teams

Liberia, one of the West African nations hardest hit by the Ebola outbreak, has a major lack of medical personal. This number is so low, that for a county of 85,000 people, it has only two doctors.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - In Bomi County, two doctors take care of all the Ebola patients and an additional 100 patients who are in a general hospital, and this number doesn't even count the rest of the county, whom they are still in charge of.

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The county's health director, Dr. Gobee Logan, doesn't complain, even though he has been hard at work, around the clock, since the Ebola outbreak first appeared in his agricultural county back in June.

Logan would like an actual Ebola treatment center, however. Currently, he's been taking care of all the Ebola patients in a holding facility, which has only 12 beds. Occasionally they have double that number, and then patients sleep on mattresses on the floor.

Logan can't send these patients to Ebola treatment centers elsewhere, because those are all full too.

The overworked doctor has been begging the Liberian government for an official Ebola treatment center for over a month, one that has more beds and a quarantine area to monitor people who have been in close contact with Ebola infected individuals.

In one case, five people had come into contact with Ebola after they washed the bodies of a mother and daughter who had died of the disease the day before. The community kicked them out after they had finished the washing.

Logan said that they couldn't go back home, and they couldn't go into the medical facility because they might get infected. He decided that they would be held in a government building where they could spend the 21-day quarantine, and be fed and taken care of by the county health department.

Currently, the World Health Organization has reported that more than 2,900 people have died from the deadly disease, and almost 6,300 people are infected.

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