Driving Naari Programme launched in Chandigarh
JOHANNESBURG, West Africa will be enduring 5,000 to 10,000 new cases of Ebola every week by the end of next month, the World Health Organization says.The worrisome new forecast was issued on Tuesday by the WHO’s deputy director-general, Bruce Aylward, in a press briefing in Geneva. He predicts a dramatic rise from the current total of about 1,000 new cases weekly.
Also Tuesday, a German hospital announced that a United Nations medical worker who was infected with Ebola in Liberia has died despite “intensive medical procedures.” Meanwhile, in Johannesburg, international aid organization Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders) said that 16 of its staff members have been infected with Ebola and nine of them have died. The death of health-care workers, as well as the infection of nursing staff in Spain and the United States treating Ebola patients, has raised questions about health-care protocols for safely handling people infected with the deadly virus.
Several weeks ago, the WHO had predicted 20,000 cases of Ebola by November, and Dr. Aylward recalled that many people were “scared to death” by that estimate. But the grim reality has far surpassed that earlier forecast. The official number of Ebola cases will climb above 9,000 this week, he said, and the number of new cases each week is showing no signs of declining.
Dr. Aylward said he hopes that the Ebola epidemic will peak by December at the forecast level of 5,000 to 10,000 new cases weekly in the three main afflicted countries: Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. By then, he said, a huge global effort against Ebola should finally be starting to ease the spread of the virus.
When the Ebola cases are tracked to their end, about 70 per cent of all Ebola patients are dying, and this death rate is consistent across the three main countries, Dr. Aylward said.
Some glimmers of hope could be seen in a few places, he said. There seems to be “behaviour change” to reduce the spread of Ebola in a few regions of the afflicted countries, and the rapid growth of new cases is beginning to ease in several districts, he said. But he warned that the Ebola virus is continuing to spread geographically in three worst-hit countries, and he said the world cannot relax its efforts to contain the epidemic.
He also noted that the United Nations goal of raising $1-billion (US) to fight Ebola is far from being reached. Less than 25 per cent of the $1-billion target has been promised so far, he said.
