75% of Ebola Victims Are Women - Health Officials

Health officials have said that about 75 per cent of people
contracting Ebola are women because they are often the primary
care-givers, nurses and traders.

The disease, which has claimed the lives of at least 1,229 people
across Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, is disproportionally
infecting women as the outbreak spreads across West Africa.

Liberia's Minister for Gender and Development, Julia Duncan-Cassell,
said that health teams at task force meeting in Liberia found
three-quarters of those who were infected or died from Ebola were
female.

She told the Washington Post: "Women are the caregivers -- if a kid is
sick, they say, 'Go to your mom.'

"The cross-border trade women go to Guinea and Sierra Leone for the
weekly markets, [and] they are also the caregivers. Most of the time
when there is a death in the family, it's the woman who prepares the
funeral, usually an aunt or older female relative."

The Ministry of Health in Liberia also said about 75 per cent of the
Ebola deaths it has counted so far have been women, Buzz Feed reports.

A spokesperson for Community Response Group and a leader of the Social
Mobilization Committee on Ebola, Suafiatu Tunis, said that female
family members are also typically expected to nurse and tend to sick
family members, increasing their risk of contracting the disease even
further.

Women in West Africa are also the traditional birth attendants, nurses
and the cleaners and laundry workers in hospitals. Ebola is
transmitted through direct contact with bodily fluids, making hospital
transmission the likely method by which it would be passed on to large
numbers of people.

A WHO spokeswoman in Monrovia, Liberia, Maricel Seeger, said that
reaching women and educating them on the disease was crucial to
tackling the virus' spread, as they play a major role as conduits of
information in their communities".

"By reaching the women, they are reaching those who can best protect
their families, and their own health," she said.

Liberia has the highest death toll and its number of cases is rising
the fastest. In response, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has ordered
West Point sealed off and imposed a night-time curfew.

At least 50,000 people live on the half-mile-long point, which is one
of the poorest and most densely populated neighbourhoods of the
capital.