The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is “racing ahead” of efforts to control it, and controlling the epidemic will cost at least $600 million, world health officials said Wednesday. The number of people infected with Ebola has grown to 3,500, with more than 1,900 deaths, according to the World Health Organization, or WHO. “We do need a major response,” said Margaret Chan, the director-general of the WHO.
The director for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention says that the Ebola outbreak is going to get worse. Speaking to “CBS This Morning” following his trip to the West African countries dealing with the outbreak, Dr. Tom Frieden explained that they have to act now to try to get Ebola under control.
At the gravesite in a northern Liberia village, there are no religious or traditional burial rites. No ceremony, no mourning, no family members, and no final goodbyes. Nothing but a group of men dressed in space-suit-like outfits, cautiously throwing the dead body into the grave, they pause only to toss in anything else they are wearing that came into contact with the deceased.
Five West African Ebola researchers died from the virus before they ever saw their work in print. The Harvard University-led study, published Thursday in Science magazine, found that the virus has mutated over the course of the 2014 outbreak, which has killed more than 1,500 people since its March onset. The work emphasized that the rapid variations could make vaccine and treatment development difficult — a point further underscored by the Ebola deaths of its authors.
A man infected with Ebola traveled to Senegal, bringing to the country the first confirmed case of the dreaded disease that has hit four other West African nations and killed more than 1,500 people, the Ministry of Health said Friday. The infected person, a university student from Guinea, sought treatment at a hospital in Senegal’s capital, Dakar, on Tuesday but gave no indication he might have Ebola, Health Minister Awa Marie Coll Seck told reporters. The next day, an epidemiological surveillance team in Guinea alerted Senegalese authorities that they had lost track of a person who had had contact with sick people.
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa eventually could exceed 20,000 cases, more than six times as many as are known now, the World Health Organization said Thursday as the United States announced plans to test an experimental Ebola vaccine. Currently, about half of the people infected with Ebola have died, so in a worst-case scenario the death toll could reach 10,000, the agency said, according to a plan released Thursday on how to stop the outbreak. The UN agency’s latest figures show that 1,552 people have died from the virus from among the 3,069 cases reported so far in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria.
The Ebola outbreak “continues to accelerate” in West Africa and has killed 1,552 people, the World Health Organization said Thursday. The total number of cases stands at 3,069, with 40% occurring in the past three weeks. “However, most cases are concentrated in only a few localities,” the WHO said.
The Democratic Republic of Congo said as many as 13 people have died of Ebola in a separate outbreak from that raging in three West African nations. Laboratory tests were positive for Ebola in two cases in a remote village in the northwest, and 11 other deaths are suspected of being due to the virus, Information Minister Lambert Mende said on Monday. The strain of Ebola in the Congo is different to that in West Africa, Mr Mende said.
“It’s even worse than I’d feared,” Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Wednesday of the Ebola outbreak rampaging through West Africa. “Every day this outbreak goes on, it increases the risk for another export to another country.
If hundreds of doctors and nurses are becoming infected with Ebola, what chance is the general public going to have? This is not just a question that many of us are asking. As you will see below, this is a question that the World Health Organization is asking.
A Liberian doctor treated with experimental American anti-Ebola serum ZMapp has died, a minister in the west African nation said on Monday. Abraham Borbor had been improving but died on Sunday night, Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown told AFP. “He was showing signs of progress but he finally died.
The outbreak of Ebola virus disease in west Africa is unprecedented in many ways, including the high proportion of doctors, nurses, and other health care workers who have been infected, warns the World Health Organization. Despite all precautions possible, more than 240 health care workers have developed the disease in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, and more than 120 have died. Simply put, they conclude, the current outbreak is different.
Authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo say two people have died from Ebola in the country’s north-west. They are the first reported Ebola cases outside West Africa since the outbreak there began, although it is not clear if they are directly linked to that outbreak. So far 1,427 people have died from the virus.
Ebola continues to spread in West Africa as Sierra Leone voted to pass a new amendment imposing jail time for anyone caught hiding an Ebola patient. With 142 new cases recorded, the total number is now 2,615 with 1,427 deaths, the World Health Organization said Friday. The group added that the magnitude of the Ebola outbreak has been “underestimated.
