FREETOWN (Reuters) – Police fired tear gas at an angry crowd fighting over food supplies in Sierra Leone yesterday, while other residents defied a three-day national lockdown that the government hopes will accelerate the end of the Ebola epidemic. Sierra Leone has reported nearly 12,000 cases and more than 3,000 deaths since the worst Ebola epidemic in history was detected in neighbouring Guinea a year ago.
New cases have fallen sharply since a peak of more than 500 a week in December but the government says the lockdown, its second, is necessary to identify the last cases and to buck a worrying trend towards complacency.
Officials have ordered the six million residents to stay indoors on pain of arrest as hundreds of health officials go door-to-door looking for hidden patients and educating residents about the haemorrhagic fever.
Residents in and around Freetown, one of the last Ebola hotspots, were told to stock up on food and water but on the second day of the campaign some said they had already run out. Officials are distributing supplies only in very poor areas.
In the Devil Hole neighbourhood hundreds of people left their homes to gather at a food collection point. Some residents complained they had not received food and fighting broke out until police arrived to scatter the crowd, making several arrests.
