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 U.N. 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. However, it said the actual number of cases
in many hard-hit areas may be two to four times higher than that. That
suggests there could be up to 12,000 cases already.
"This far outstrips any historic Ebola outbreak in numbers. The largest
outbreak in the past was about 400 cases," Dr. Bruce Aylward, WHO's
assistant director-general for emergency operations, told reporters.
More than 40 percent of the cases have been identified in the last three
weeks, the U.N. health agency said, adding that "the outbreak continues
to accelerate." Aylward said the agency does not necessarily expect
20,000 cases, but a system must be put into place to handle such a
massive increase in case numbers.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health, meanwhile, announced it will
start testing an experimental Ebola vaccine in humans next week. The
vaccine was developed by the U.S. government and GlaxoSmithKline and the
preliminary trial will test the shot in healthy U.S. adults in
Maryland. At the same time, British experts will test the same vaccine
in healthy people in the U.K., Gambia and Mali.
The vaccine trial was accelerated in response to the outbreak that has
ravaged West Africa and led to riots as poorly designed quarantines were
put into place against tens of thousands of people.
Preliminary results to determine if the vaccine is safe could be available within months.
Aylward said the current outbreak was posing a unique challenge because
there are multiple hotspots in several countries, including some in
densely populated urban areas. Previous outbreaks had happened in a
single, remote area.
The new plan aims to stop Ebola transmission in affected countries
within six to nine months and prevent it from spreading internationally.
It calls for $489 million over the next nine months and requires 750
international health workers and 12,000 national ones.
The goal is to take "the heat out of this outbreak" within three months,
Aylward said. The next goal would be to stop the transmission of the
killer virus within eight weeks of a new case being confirmed anywhere
in the world.
The third major goal is to increase the preparedness for dealing with
Ebola in all nations that share borders with affected countries or have
major transportation hubs, he said.
Doctors Without Borders, a charity that has criticized the WHO and the
international community for responding too slowly to the crisis, warned
that the new U.N. plan "should not give a false sense of hope."
"As an international public health emergency, states with the capacity
to help have the responsibility to mobilize resources to the affected
countries, rather than watching from the sidelines with a naive hope
that the situation will improve," Brice de le Vingne, the group's
director of operations, said in a statement.
Air France on Wednesday canceled its flights to Sierra Leone; the WHO has urged airlines to lift such restrictions.
"Right now there is a super risk of the response effort being choked
off, being restricted, because we simply cannot get enough seats on
enough airplanes to get people in and out, and rotating, to get goods
and supplies in and out and rotating," Aylward said.
Nigerian authorities, meanwhile, said a man who contracted Ebola after
coming into contact with a traveler from Liberia had evaded surveillance
and infected a doctor in southern Nigeria who later died.
The doctor is the sixth person to die of the disease in Nigeria and
marks the first fatality outside the commercial capital of Lagos, where a
Liberian-American man, Patrick Sawyer, flew in in late July.
The World Food Program says it is preparing to feed 1.3 million people
in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the coming months because
measures to control an Ebola outbreak have cut off whole communities
from markets, pushed up food prices and separated farmers from their
fields. Denise Brown, the West Africa regional director for the U.N.
agency, said $70 million is needed immediately to meet those needs.
———
Larson reported from Dakar, Senegal. Bashir Adigun in Abuja, Nigeria,
Sarah DiLorenzo in Dakar and Maria Cheng in London contributed to this
report.
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