The Ebola outbreak has been “vastly underestimated” and requires containment efforts far greater than those currently being taken, health experts warn.
The outbreak of the virus in West Africa—described as the worst ever—has already killed over 1,000 people in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone and has infected nearly 2,000.
Click Here: cheap sydney roosters jersey
In a statement issued Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said, “Staff at the outbreak sites see evidence that the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak.”
The United Nations agency added that it “is coordinating a massive scaling up of the international response, marshalling support from individual countries, disease control agencies, agencies within the United Nations system, and others.”
The WHO declared the Ebola outbreak a public health emergency on Aug. 8, a declaration which came too late, according to humanitarian medical aid organization Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres).
Speaking to reporters in Geneva on Friday Joanne Liu, international president of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said, “I think the wake-up call was too late in calling it a public health emergency of international concern.”
Liu, just back from a 10-day trip to the Ebola-affected countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, said that the epidemic “is deteriorating faster, and moving faster, than we can respond to,” adding, “I really had the feeling that it is a wartime, in terms of fear.”
She expects it to take six months to “get the upper hand on the epidemic,” and said in some areas lack of access to basic healthcare created “an emergency within an emergency.”
Liu said that Liberia was a key area in the fight, saying, “If we don’t stabilize Liberia, we’ll never stabilize the region.” Cases appearing in the Nigerian city of Lagos were a concern as well, she said, because “we have no past experience of Ebola within an urban setting.”
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT