Liberian president sacks 10 senior officials for fleeing Ebola epidemic

Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has sacked 10 senior officials for failure to heed a warning to return from overseas travel to help the government's fight against an Ebola epidemic that had left at least 1,100 Liberians dead, Reuters reported.

The officials, including six assistant ministers, two deputy ministers and two commissioners, were dismissed with immediate effect for being "out of the country without an excuse", a statement from the president's office said. They had been first told in August to return to Liberia.

"These government officials showed insensitivity to our national tragedy and disregard for authority," said the statement released late on Saturday. The statement did not clarify what role the government expected the officials to play in the response to the crisis, or why they were out of the country.

The contagious, haemorrhagic fever was first discovered in eastern Guinea in March earlier in the year and has since killed over 2,400 people, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, in the worst Ebola outbreak the world has seen.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the epidemic was spreading exponentially in Liberia, where over half of the deaths had been recorded. It had said that thousands continued to be at risk of contagion in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, in response to the growing Ebola threat, the governments of Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea had closed their schools and though the closures were only temporary, it could change if the virus continued to spread and accelerated, The Guardian reports.

As of 12 September, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea were faced with widespread and intense transmission of Ebola (about 100 to 200 new cases per country per week), while in other countries the outbreak had been more localised.

However, in each of the affected areas a rapid expansion of the threat was a possibilty, and there were credible predictions that Ebola could migrate to 15 additional countries and infect over 20,000 people.

With that prognosis, closing schools is seen as a prudent step to protect children and their families from exposure and the most immediate priority was to put out a raging and growing fire that threatened to affect more lives and territory.

Many of the Ebola-impacted nations had been struggling already to provide education for children who had missed years of schooling due to poverty or civil war.

The problem of lost time would be compounded as the health crisis was putting on hold teacher training, school constructions, curriculum reviews and  textbooks delivery.