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THE UN’S HEALTH agency has said that the scale of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has been vastly underestimated and “extraordinary measures” were needed to contain the disease.
As the official toll climbed to 1,069, according to World Health Organisation, the United States ordered the evacuation of diplomats’ families from Sierra Leone, one of the three countries at the epicentre of the outbreak along with Liberia and Guinea.
The Geneva-based WHO said in a statement it was coordinating “a massive scaling up of the international response”, in a bid to tackle the worst epidemic of haemorrhagic fever-causing virus since its discovery four decades ago.
“Staff at the outbreak sites see evidence that the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak,” it said.
“The outbreak is expected to continue for some time. WHO’s operational response plan extends over the next several months,” the organisation warned.
A serious outbreak in Lagos, where the epidemic claimed a fourth victim yesterday, could severely disrupt the oil and gas industry in Nigeria if international companies are forced to evacuate staff and local operations are shut down, the Moody’s rating agency warned.
Any “decline in production would quickly translate into economic and fiscal deterioration,” said Matt Robinson, senior credit officer at Moody’s.
Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama called President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and Sierra Leone’s leader Ernest Bai Koromo.
The calls came as the US State Department ordered families of its diplomats in Sierra Leone to leave the country to avoid exposure.
“In his conversations with both leaders, the president underscored the commitment of the United States to work with Liberia, Sierra Leone, and other international partners to contain the outbreak and expressed his condolences for the lives lost,” the White House said in a statement.
In Sierra Leone’s parliament yesterday, the country’s chief medical officer, Dr Brima Kargbo, spoke of the difficulties health workers were facing in fighting the epidemic.
“We still have to break the chain of transmission to separate the infected from the uninfected,” Kargbo said. But, he added: “There is a rejection among people of the existence of Ebola and hostility towards health workers.”
The disease has taken its toll on those trying to help its victims.
Sierra Leone disclosed Thursday that 32 nurses died from Ebola while performing their duties between May 24 to August 13.
South Africa has stepped in to help the country by sending a mobile laboratory to be installed in the capital Freetown to ease the problem of having to send blood samples elsewhere for analysis, Sierra Leone’s health ministry said.
‘Need more centres’
In Liberia, which has suffered more than 300 deaths, work began on Thursday to expand its Ebola treatment centre in the capital Monrovia — one of only two centres in the country of 4.2 million.
“We need to increase the size of this place because more and more people arrive every day due to the awareness programme,” Nathaniel Dovillie, head of the centre, told AFP.
The cost of tackling the virus threatens to exact a severe economic toll on the already impoverished west African nations at the epicentre of the outbreak — Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea — the Moody’s rating agency warned.
“The outbreak risks having a direct financial effect on government budgets via increased health expenditures that could be significant,” it said.
Liberia spent $12 million (nine million euros) tackling the Ebola outbreak between April and June, and looks set to spend much more in the coming weeks.
Increasingly draconian restrictions have been put in place across the region.
Guinea, where the outbreak has killed at least 377, declared a “health emergency” on Wednesday and ordered strict controls at border points and a ban on moving bodies “from one town to another until the end of the epidemic”.
A number of airlines have cancelled flights in and out of West Africa. Gambia suspended all flights from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to a transport ministry document obtained by AFP.
Although the World Health Organisation confirmed that other African countries, including Kenya, were labelled at “high risk” due to their popular transport hubs, it also emphasised that “air travel, even from Ebola-affected countries, is low risk for Ebola transmission” because the virus is not airborne.
Experimental treatments
Canada’s Health Minister Rona Ambrose said between 800 to 1,000 doses of a vaccine called VSV-EBOV, which has shown promise in animal research but never been tested on humans, would be distributed through the WHO.
Hard-hit nations were also anxiously awaiting a consignment of up to 1,000 doses of the barely tested drug ZMapp from the United States, which has raised hopes of saving hundreds infected with the disease.
There is currently no available cure or vaccine for Ebola, which the WHO has declared a global public health emergency. The body has said it is ethical to try largely untested treatments “in the special circumstances of this Ebola outbreak”.
- © AFP 2014.
Do you people know how serious a disease this is? Do you think there is a reason that the researchers wear spacesuits? Do you think that the need for a negative pressure sealed room is a needed precaution? This is the nastiest disease around. It needs to be respected.
It’ll get extremely serious when it affects other continents other than Africa.
Its in Ireland… Thanks Ryanair!
Wow, even non aviation based articles on the journal attract idiotic Ryanair comments that are completely irrelevant to the story
oh please
Ebola is highly infections but NOT highly contagious, it’s spreading in Africa for reasons that would simply not apply in western Europe.
They are wearing CBRN suits so they don’t come into contact with the persons vomit, urine, blood, saliva etc
People really need to stop this hysterical panic it’s getting completely out of hand.
Only one case of Ebola has ever appeared in European history and it was in Switzerland. There are no direct flights between Ireland and Africa, it’s v unlikely to get here and if it does it will NOT spread like it does in Africa because we don’t have any of the factors fueling that spread here.
I beg the readers of this site to base their conclusions on this on science, reason, logic and evidence and stop reading the tabloids and uninformed nonsense on message boards and taking it as gospel.
Gobs#ite
Ebola has never spread like this before. WHO has admitted that’s it’s worse than expected. Who is to say that this hasn’t mutated and is passing like the flu. Remember they are going to withhold information that would panic people.
”who is to say it hasn’t mutated and is passing like the flu”
The people taking blood tests from every single paitent that’s been infected and studying it, there is ZERO indication of mutation, viruses have a tendency to become less lethal over time not more, mutations to a worse strain are rare.
Stop scaremongering Glen, it’s irresponsible and you are worrying people who don’t know any better who might be conned into thinking you know what your’e talking about.
The following are the reasons it’s spreading so fast:
1. It’s never been seen in west africa before, it’s usually in other parts of the continent, so many are confusing it with other conditions like fever and flu and don’t know their loved ones have it, so they clean up their vomit etc and get infected
.2 They don’t handle the dead the way we do in western countries, leading to more infections
3. Superstition is leading them to think it’s the doctors and other non-factors spreading it, this is also leading to entire towns being cut off from help by armed gangs keeping medical staff out.
Stop spreading ignorance Glen.
People reading this, please understand the rest of us are giving you logic, science, and evidence based conclusions whereas the likes of Glen are giving you hysteria, hearsay and panic.
.
Will it be IMF or BRIC that steps in to buy low?
I don’t know, is Brazil Russia India China some kind of new economic unit now or are you just repeating stuff you heard grown ups say?
I’d assume he meant IBRC but he made a balls of his own poor gag.
And we in the west won’t think about until it gets here and white folk start dying.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonhartley/2014/07/28/the-brics-bank-is-born-out-of-politics/
Keep up, Dung.
That would be BRICS bank as opposed to BRICS then. ..
You’re correct. I see where I was possibly confusing you and I should have made it clearer. I was foolish to assume extrapolation wasn’t beyond some of the readers. I’ll try to take better notes when I listen to the grown ups speak.
Someone pointed out to me that more people have been killed in Gaza by attacks and Israel in the last few weeks than have ever died of Ebola.
More people have died on Irish roads in just the last 3 months than the entire no of Europeans in human history that have died of Eboola
I can’t explain how serious this is, possibly the most serious outbreak of my generation. We may need to call in the seeker so we don’t get fooled again.
What’s the seeker?
He’s a friend of my wife and Baba O’Reilly, he knows Tommy too I think
Good old journal tabloid headlines as usual
If you must scaremonger, scaremonger about a topic that people aren’t already unnecessarily freaked out about.
Neal,
Freaked out, don’t think so. Take look at the article re Dublin this a.m.
Biggest joke yet. We are about to patent flat7UP cure. Demand may outstrip supply.
NO PANIC, calm down.
RTE news are claiming that the HSE said the journal.ie got it wrong and nobody is prepping the matter hospital for an Ebola case.
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