(Newswire.net — September 13, 2014) — In the three hardest hit countries, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the number of new Ebola patients is moving far faster than the capacity to manage them.
“We need to surge at least three to four times to catch up with the outbreaks,” WHO director general Margaret Chan told reporters yesterday at the UN health agency’s headquarters in in Geneva.
“The death toll has risen to more than 2,400 people out of 4,784 cases, noting the figures could be an underestimate,” Chan said.
She called for urgent international support in the form of doctors, nurses, medical supplies and aid to the worst-affected countries.
Almost half of the 301 health-care workers treating patients in West Africa have been infected with Ebola and died.
“The key to containing the outbreak is to beef up efforts to stop the spread of the virus,” said Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
“If we wait for vaccines and new drugs to arrive to end the Ebola epidemic, instead of taking major action now, we risk the disease’s reaching from West Africa to our own backyards,” he concluded in a commentary titled, “What We’re Afraid to Say About Ebola.”
Meanwhile, an editorial in Eurosurveillance, published by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said that “Ebola cannot be ignored in the hope it will burn itself out.”
A study published in Eurosurveillance projects shows that, if the growth in cases continues at its current pace, under a worst-case scenario there could be another 77,000 to 277,000 cases by the end of the year.
“Many of the issues currently facing West Africa — from lack of trust in health authorities to poor infection control — have surfaced before, and have been overcome.
However, the current outbreak is unprecedented both in size and scale and it will “require a response to match,” they concluded.
Darren Tosh is project director of Samaritan’s Purse Canada. One of the group’s US missionaries, Dr. Kent Bradly, was infected with Ebola in West Africa and has recovered.
“The epidemiological models show this Ebola outbreak to be taking tens of thousands of lives that we’ve yet to even project,” Tosh said. “We can see that this epidemic is not slowing down and we just try to continue to ramp up as much as we can.”
When it comes to pandemics, it only takes a little global connectedness to trigger a cascade of infections. The outbreak of Ebola raging in West Africa— labeled a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization—echoes a scenario mapped out by NECSI in 2006.
In a computer simulation of pathogens and hosts (see video, upper left), long-range routes of transmission — most prominently, international air routes — can allow the deadliest viral strains to outrun their own extinction, and in the process kill vastly more victims than they would have otherwise.