Radio stations played Ebola awareness jingles on repeat and encouraged residents to stay indoors. Related ArticlesAustralian man isolated in Ebola scare4th doctor dies of Ebola in Sierra LeoneUS to assign 3,000 from US military to fight Ebola7 killed while on Guinea Ebola education campaign
Streets in the capital of Sierra Leone were deserted on Friday as the West African state began a contested, three-day lockdown in a bid to halt the worst Ebola outbreak on record.
President Ernest Bai Koroma urged people to heed the emergency measures as health workers, some clad in protective biohazard suits, went house to house, checking on residents and marking each doorway they visited with chalk.
Radio stations played Ebola awareness jingles on repeat and encouraged residents to stay indoors.
"As they are fighting this Ebola, we pray that it will be eradicated. That's what we are praying for," Mariam Bangura told Reuters as she waited at her home in Freetown's West End neighbourhood. Other residents looked out over the normally bustling seaside city from windows and balconies.
Nearly 30,000 health workers, volunteers and teachers aim to visit every household in the country of six million people by Sunday to educate them about the disease and isolate the sick.
In Freetown, teams got off to a slow start, waiting several hours to receive kits containing soap, stickers and flyers.
"We are already late. You know this is the first day of the campaign, it is possible to be that way. But I believe by tomorrow it will not be so," said Alie Sufian Turay, the leader of one of the teams.
A few police cars and ambulances, sirens blaring, were the only traffic on the otherwise empty streets. One emergency vehicle was seen stopping at a house to take on a patient.
Ebola has infected about 5,357 people in West Africa this year, mainly in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, killing 2,630 of them, in the most deadly epidemic of the virus since it was discovered in 1976 in the forests of central Africa.
Western nations, led by the United States, have pledged in recent days to ramp up their aid effort and the United Nations said on Thursday it would deploy a special mission, calling the outbreak a "threat to international peace and security".
In Sierra Leone, at least 562 people have died so far from the disease.
"Today, the life of everyone is at stake, but we will get over this difficulty if all do what we have been asked to do," President Koroma said in a television address late on Thursday.
"These are extraordinary times and extraordinary times require extraordinary measures."
Some have questioned whether the campaign will be effective. Sierra Leone newspaper Awareness Times in an editorial called
Streets in the capital of Sierra Leone were deserted on Friday as the West African state began a contested, three-day lockdown in a bid to halt the worst Ebola outbreak on record.
President Ernest Bai Koroma urged people to heed the emergency measures as health workers, some clad in protective biohazard suits, went house to house, checking on residents and marking each doorway they visited with chalk.
Radio stations played Ebola awareness jingles on repeat and encouraged residents to stay indoors.
"As they are fighting this Ebola, we pray that it will be eradicated. That's what we are praying for," Mariam Bangura told Reuters as she waited at her home in Freetown's West End neighbourhood. Other residents looked out over the normally bustling seaside city from windows and balconies.
Nearly 30,000 health workers, volunteers and teachers aim to visit every household in the country of six million people by Sunday to educate them about the disease and isolate the sick.
In Freetown, teams got off to a slow start, waiting several hours to receive kits containing soap, stickers and flyers.
"We are already late. You know this is the first day of the campaign, it is possible to be that way. But I believe by tomorrow it will not be so," said Alie Sufian Turay, the leader of one of the teams.
A few police cars and ambulances, sirens blaring, were the only traffic on the otherwise empty streets. One emergency vehicle was seen stopping at a house to take on a patient.
Ebola has infected about 5,357 people in West Africa this year, mainly in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, killing 2,630 of them, in the most deadly epidemic of the virus since it was discovered in 1976 in the forests of central Africa.
Western nations, led by the United States, have pledged in recent days to ramp up their aid effort and the United Nations said on Thursday it would deploy a special mission, calling the outbreak a "threat to international peace and security".
In Sierra Leone, at least 562 people have died so far from the disease.
"Today, the life of everyone is at stake, but we will get over this difficulty if all do what we have been asked to do," President Koroma said in a television address late on Thursday.
"These are extraordinary times and extraordinary times require extraordinary measures."
Some have questioned whether the campaign will be effective. Sierra Leone newspaper Awareness Times in an editorial called
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