Ebola disease and hooded health workers

In the nation’s medical history, there is perhaps no disease that has threatened the health sector and social relations as the lethal Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) imported into the country by the late Liberian-American, Patrick Sawyer. The emissary of the deadly virus was in the country for an ECOWAS conference in Calabar, Cross River State, but later ended up in a highbrow hospital at Obalende, Lagos, where he transmitted the terror virus to many Nigerians before giving up the ghost. Nigerians are not deceived by the biased defence of this evil act by his beautiful wife, Decontee Sawyer, from far away United States. Despite Decontee’s beautiful prose and logic, Nigerians are skeptical to accept that Sawyer was seeking for better medical treatment in Nigeria and not to spread the virus as argued by his wife. If sawyer was, indeed, seeking for world class medical treatment for the disease, the best place for him to go to would have been the US, where his beau of a wife resides and not Nigeria with its weak health systems. We have had enough of Decontee’s irritable deconstruction myths. She should stop this shameless urinating on the graves of those unfortunate Nigerians killed by Sawyer’s imported virus. If Sawyer did not embark on that suicide mission to Nigeria, the protocol officer that met him at the airport, the doctor and two nurses that died as a result of having contact with him and some others infected with the virus would not have met such devilish fate.
Why did the Liberian authorities allow Sawyer, a quarantined Ebola patient, leave their shores and flew to Nigeria with the disease that has affected every aspect of our human relations including greeting, love and worship?  Ebola has threatened everything sacred and profane. Now, we do not know the difference between Ekpo masquerade or Mmonwu Oza Ebule and the hooded health workers. They seem to look alike. Everything in Nigeria is now put in abeyance and Ebola disease has taken the front burner of national discourse. We talk and sermonize on the disease on a daily basis as if our life depends on it. The fear of Ebola is now the beginning of wisdom in healthy living. Even husbands and wives are also scared of the dread. Not even the dre...
aded HIV/AIDS or other sexually-transmitted disease gave Nigerians much concern as Ebola. With others, you can touch but with Ebola, other things including hugging and kissing are forbidden. Even the usual handshake at social gatherings and in churches, especially the Catholic Church, has been banned. We have in the interim devised series of Ebola handshakes and other forms of greeting including the ridiculous ones. May God help us from this wrath of the malevolent spirits.  While the pandemic is fast spreading, a brother from the US advised me to take precautionary measures to avert it.
To amuse him profusely, I retorted that I have plenty bitter kola as antidote to Ebola. I have added hand sanitizer for every hand wash to my anti-Ebola regimen. The giving of Holy Communion from hand to mouth in the church is equally affected. Even without Ebola, why should Holy Communion be administered in such manner? Is it hygienic? The good news now is that the Holy Communion can be taken with hands by the communicants as done abroad.
Thank God that Sawyer got so ill in the flight that coming down from the aircraft was not easy hence his immediate hospitalization at First Consultant Hospital, Obalende. Thanks for the authorities of the hospital for their meticulousness in dictating the harmful virus and promptly alerting the nation’s health authorities that responded swiftly. Thanks also for Lagos State government for readily response in providing public health information on the virus and quarantine facilities. If Sawyer had entered the city through land borders, only God knows how many people would have died from the virus.
The Federal Government’s response to the pandemic, though very encouraging, was not helped by the national strike by medical doctors in public hospitals. If Ebola could not make the adamant doctors change their hearts and adhere to the age-long Hippocratic Oath, which they always flout, their sack by government is quite in order. Nobody can tolerate an unruly worker with irritable demands for doing so little. No employee is bigger than his employer. Government should not succumb to their blackmail. Let new doctors be employed.
The striking doctors should not be allowed to kill the health sector. Are doctors the only underpaid Nigerian workers? Who says they are indispensable? They should know that modern medicine that made them doctors was not there before. No doctor should be allowed to put the health sector in danger. Any doctor that is tired of government work should resign and set up private practice. The Health Minister, Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu should have sacked these doctors a long time ago. But they show remorse, let them be recalled. Government should also attend to poor remuneration of doctors and indeed all Nigerian workers. Our hospitals should be well equipped too.
Thanks for the doctors in private practice that have been in the forefront of the battle to contain the pandemic and other health emergencies since the wicked and malicious doctors’ strike. Government should do something to strengthen private medical practice. Nigerians have lost hope in the public hospitals due to frequent and mindless doctors’ strike. The doctors’ strike, more than the lack of requisite equipments, is fast killing the health sector. Government should do something quickly to save the nation’s health sector.
It is commendable that government has started the sanitization of the sector with the sack of the doctors. Let those who want to work be employed to replace those that have become experts in trade unionism at the expense of human lives. The curricular of the nation’s medical schools should be reviewed to include courses on empathy and love for human life. The character and psychology of those to be admitted into medical schools must be checked to ensure that they have passion for the profession and love for mankind. We need doctors that place human life first before any other consideration. We are tired of doctors that prefer strike while their patients die.
We need doctors with milk of human kindness in their veins. No matter what happens, the good news is that Ebola is not a death sentence. Some infected ones have fully recovered in the country. Strict observation of personal hygiene is vital to its prevention.