Ebola: 38% increase in deaths over 1 week ago

Deadly Ebola is on the march

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The new death toll represented a rise of 129 - or 38% - since the UN agency's last bulletin released just a week ago. File photo.

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Deadly Ebola is on the march

AFP | 03 July, 2014 00:00

The new death toll represented a rise of 129 - or 38% - since the UN agency's last bulletin released just a week ago. File photo
Image by: STRINGER / REUTERS

Health ministers from across western Africa met yesterday to plan "drastic action" against the world's deadliest-ever Ebola epidemic as dozens of new cases continued to emerge.

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There have been 759 confirmed or suspected cases of the haemorrhagic fever in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday, and 467 people have died.
The new death toll represented a rise of 129 - or 38% - since the UN agency's last bulletin released just a week ago.
"This makes the ongoing Ebola outbreak the largest in terms of the number of cases and deaths as well as geographical spread," the WHO said, announcing the two-day conference that opened in Ghana's capital Accra, with 11 west African health ministers attending.
Since the region's first ever epidemic of the deadly and highly contagious fever broke out in Guinea in January, the WHO has sent in more than 150 experts to help tackle the regional crisis.
Medical charity Doctors Without Borders said last week that the spread of the virus, which has had a mortality rate of up to 90% in previous outbreaks, was "out of control", with more than 60 outbreak hotspots.
The agency has warned that Ebola could spread to other countries.
The agency's top Ebola specialist, Pierre Formenti, said last month that the recent surge in cases had come in part because efforts to contain the virus had been relaxed too quickly after the outbreak appeared to slow down in April.
"One case can restart an entire epidemic," he warned.
Ministers from Guinea, where 413 confirmed, suspected and probable cases have surfaced so far, including 303 deaths, and Liberia, which has seen 107 cases and 65 deaths, will take part in the meeting.
The WHO has described the current Ebola epidemic as one of the most challenging since the virus was first identified in 1976 in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
That outbreak, the deadliest until this year, killed 280 people. Ebola can fell its victims within days, causing severe fever and muscle pain, weakness, vomiting and diarrhoea, and in some cases causing unstoppable bleeding.
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Deadly Ebola is on the march

My wife and I were watching, "The Last Ship" which is a new series for the summer but as we watched the 2nd episode I had to turn it off as I saw that the worldwide virus looked a lot like Ebola that people were dying from. I got a bad feeling that this series might be a little "too" prophetic of real life here on earth.

I don't think Ebola would ever spread like this "naturally". So, my point of view is that someone (or more than one someone) is trying to spread it for whatever the reason. If it gets out of North and West Africa into Paris or europe this could be a serious mess for the whole world then because Ebola kills up to 90% of the people it touches.

The 1918 Flu killed 50 to 100 million people or 2% to 3% of the entire population of the earth.

For example, 2% of the world's population at 7 billion would be 140 million people. But, if you took this as 90% of the world's population it would be: 6.3 billion people potentially that could go out from Ebola if it got loose out of Africa.

Doctors and scientists and educators have long feared something like this. However, all you have to do is to look at the history of the black plague or smallpox as it ravaged Europe or the native Americans in the U.S. in North and South America.