Shropshire medic will spend Christmas tackling Ebola crisis in Africa

Speaking today, Dr Martin Deahl, from Newport, who travelled to the country last month as part of a team of NHS volunteers, warned of "massive under reporting" of cases and to take World Health Organisation figures with "a pinch of salt".

The consultant psychiatrist, 58, who practises across the county for South Staffordshire and Shropshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (SSSFT), said: "Anybody who knows what the symptoms are is supposed to dial an emergency number and people come out to check you out.

"A lot of people do not do that because they know that if a relative is suspected you know these men in spacesuits turn up, take their relative who they know they are more than likely never going to see again and destroy their possessions because they will be infected and compensation for those possessions is slow in coming too, so there is all sorts of incentives to stop people reporting so a lot of cases die out in the bush.

"For example a body found outside yesterday was somebody who had been kept from the authorities and died in the night and was brought out by his relatives.

"There is massive under reporting. On average there are about 40 new cases a day reported in this local district and about 20 corpses found.

"It is very difficult to know if the situation is getting better or not, some people say it is levelling off but there is so much under reporting we really do not know.

"Some estimates say that the under reporting is as bad as one in five cases, so getting accurate figures is really really hard. Any statistics in the media, whether they are from the World Health Organisation or whoever they are from, you have to take with a pinch of salt because data collection is not good. There are suspicious wary people who won't come forward and report new cases.

"I am speaking to my family fairly often, we have wifi and email but it is hard.

"I feel guilty because obviously I get the pats on the back for coming out here and doing this but to enable me to do this my wife and family have to go through an awful lot of inconvenience and my work colleagues are manning the shop and doing twice the work load. Behind every person who is out here in the group, there are families and work colleagues. They are doing their bit to fight this epidemic as well and it would not be possible for me to come out here unless they were prepared to carry that burden.

Asked how he would be spending Christmas, Dr Deahl said: "Sierra Leone is wonderful because up until about yesterday there were no trappings of Christmas here at all but from about yesterday we heard Christmas carols on the radio and to have O' Come All Ye Faithful played by a steel band with a reggae beat is quite something. I gather within the next few days the whole country comes to a stand still and carries on celebrating for the next three or four weeks into January."

Dr Deahl is also a serving Colonel in the Territorial Army, a civilian consultant advisor to the RAF, NHS national clinical lead for the military in-patient mental health contract and has published more than 70 scientific papers on traumatic stress.

County paramedic Tom Waters is also out in Africa tackling the crisis.

Mr Waters, a critical care paramedic who works on the Midlands Air Ambulance based at RAF Cosford, is among 30 NHS staff who flew out last month.