Nurses Start Strike over Ebola Pay in Sierra Leone

Two days after northern Sierra Leone kicked-off a lockdown to intensify government effort to contain Ebola spread, nurses from same region have gone on strike Thursday to demand hazard pay for treating Ebola patients, as the region was under lockdown in a bid by authorities to combat the killer virus.

 

Some 30 nurses at the Mabenteh Hospital in the town of Makeni said they had been refusing to work since Wednesday because of “the non payment of risk allowance” by the government for the month of November.

A spokesman for the nurses, Henry Conteh, told public radio: “We are not going to attend to any patients who are already admitted and will not accept any new cases until we are paid.” “The matter is serious and needs to be settled urgently,” he said. There was no immediate information available on how much money the health workers were owed or how many patients had been turned away.