Guinea has recorded 489 deaths and 749 Ebola cases as of Sept. 1, and the epicenter of the outbreak has shifted to neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Guinean President Alpha Conde urged healthcare personnel to intensify efforts to avoid new infections. The disease is spread by physical contact with body fluids of infected people or contaminated articles, such as needles.
“Even for a simple malaria (case), you have to protect yourselves before consulting any sick person until the end of this epidemic,” Conde said in a televised broadcast. “We had started to succeed, but you dropped the ball and here we go again.”
The haemorrhagic fever was gaining in Nigeria where 18 cases, including 7 deaths, have been reported, three in the oil hub of Port Harcourt. The WHO warned that the outbreak there “has the potential to grow larger and spread faster than the one in Lagos” as containment measures had been less effective.
The fifth country infected was Senegal, which confirmed its first case last week: a student who slipped across the border from Guinea and made his way to the coastal capital Dakar.
More than 50 cases of Ebola have been reported in a remote northern jungle region of Democratic Republic of Congo, although these are not linked to the West African cases.
Since Ebola was first detected in Congo in 1976, WHO has reported more than 20 outbreaks in Africa and 1,590 victims.
The WHO warned last week that the Ebola epidemic in West Africa could infect more than 20,000 people and spread to 10 countries.
WORRIES VIRUS COULD MUTATE
Dr. Thomas Kenyon, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Centre for Global Health, said on Wednesday the outbreak was “spiraling out of control” and warned that the window of opportunity for controlling it was closing.
“Guinea did show that with action, they brought it partially under control. But unfortunately it is back on the increase now,” he told a conference call. “It’s not under control anywhere.”
He warned that the longer the outbreak went uncontained, the greater the possibility the virus could mutate, making it more difficult to contain. While Ebola is transmitted in humans by contact with bodily fluids of the sick, suspected cases of airborne infection have been reported in monkeys in laboratories.
A senior U.S. official rebutted a call from global aid organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) for wealthy nations to deploy specialized biological disaster response teams to the region. MSF on Tuesday had warned that 800 more beds for Ebola patients were urgently needed in the Liberian capital Monrovia alone.
“I don’t think at this point deploying biological incident response teams is exactly what’s needed,” said Gayle Smith, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Development and Democracy on the National Security Council.
She said the U.S. government was focusing on rapidly increasing the number of Ebola treatment centers in affected countries, providing protective equipment, and training local staff. “We will see a considerable ramp-up in the coming days and weeks. If we find it is still moving out of control, we will look at other options,” Smith told a conference call. (Reuters)[eap_ad_3]
