6th Nun Gets Ebola; Quarantine of Region Affected by Virus Is Lifted

Another Italian nun based in the town of Kikwit in Zaire has contracted the deadly Ebola virus that has already killed five of her colleagues together with scores of local people, her order said Saturday.

Father Arturo Bellini, a spokesman in Bergamo, Italy, for the Little Sisters of the Poor, which is based in Bergamo and specializes in medicine, identified the nun as Annelvira Ossoli.

He said Ossoli, the head nun of the province of Kinshasa, had gone to Kikwit in the province of Bandundu to care for her order’s sick nuns when the disease broke out.

“She went down with a fever last Tuesday. At first it seemed her illness was the result of the stress and fatigue of caring for the sick nuns, but now her condition is a cause for great concern,” Bellini said.

Meanwhile Saturday, Zaire lifted the quarantine of the region affected by the killer virus, allowing free travel between the region and the rest of the country for the first time in 10 days.

The move was not an indication the epidemic is over--the death toll jumped Saturday to 97 from 89 the previous day--but an admission that the quarantine was a misguided effort to control the illness.

“It was a bad misunderstanding,” said Dr. Abdou Moudi of the World Health Organization, describing the attempt to lock up the entire Bandundu region.

Health experts said the quarantine was largely ineffective because soldiers manning the main roadblock on the highway to Kinshasa could easily be bribed. In addition, they said anyone already struck by the virus would be too weak to make his or her way out of the quarantined region.

Moudi said the World Health Organization had never intended the government to quarantine an entire section of the country. Instead, it recommended that hospitals with Ebola victims put them in special wards and that cities with Ebola cases be sealed.

Doctors prevented six people from passing into the neighboring Kinshasa region because they had fevers, but there was no indication they were suffering from Ebola.