Eight people, including three journalists, were killed in an attack on a team trying to educate locals on the risks of the Ebola virus in a remote area of southeastern Guinea, a government spokesman said on Thursday. "The eight bodies were found in the village latrine. Three of them had their throats slit," Damantang Albert Camara told Reuters. The killings are an example of what aid officials have been saying: the Ebola epidemic, in which more than 2,600 people have died, is disrupting not only public health but society in general. “We have seen so many patients die. And they die alone, terrified, and without their loved ones at their side,” Jackson K.P. Naimah of Doctors Without Borders, on Monrovia, Liberia told a United Nations Security Council emergency session earlier Thursday.
“This is likely the greatest peacetime challenge that the United Nations and its agencies have ever faced,” WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan told the UN. “This is not just an outbreak. This is not just a public health crisis. This is a social crisis, a humanitarian crisis, an economic crisis, and a threat to national security well beyond the outbreak zones.” The Associated Press reported that shoppers in Sierra Leone were rushing to stock up on food ahead of a three-day nationwide shutdown. The country's 6 million people must stay home while volunteers search house-to-house for Ebola victims in hiding and distribute soap.
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-- Maggie Fox
