UN: Ebola disease caseload could reach 20,000
The Ebola outbreak in West
Africa is accelerating and could grow six times larger to infect as many
as 20,000 people, the World Health Organization said Thursday. The U.N.
health agency unveiled a new road map for containing the virus, and
scientists are fast-tracking efforts to find a treatment or vaccine.
Ebola has
menaced Africa for 40 years, but previously struck in remote villages
and was contained fairly quickly. This time, it has spread to major
cities in four countries, provoking unrest as whole neighborhoods and
towns have been sealed to the outside.
An
experimental vaccine developed by the U.S. government and
GlaxoSmithKline will be tested on humans starting next week, the U.S.
National Institutes of Health announced Thursday. The NIH trial will use
healthy adult volunteers in Maryland, and British experts will
simultaneously test the same vaccine in healthy people in the U.K.,
Gambia and Mali.
Preliminary results on the vaccine's safety — not its effectiveness — could be available in months.
Scientists
also announced that they have mapped the genetic code of this strain of
Ebola to better understand how it kills. In a study published Thursday
in the journal Science, researchers traced an explosion of cases in this
outbreak to a single funeral in Guinea in May.
They
hope to use DNA mapping to track mutations that could become more
worrisome the longer the outbreak lasts, and make a difference in the
how doctors spot and fight the disease as vaccines are developed.
The outbreak has now
killed at least 1,552 people among 3,069 reported cases in Liberia,
Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria, and the real caseload in urban areas
could be two to four times higher. Meanwhile, an entirely separate Ebola
outbreak has killed 13 of 42 people sickened in a remote area of Congo,
in Central Africa, the agency said.
With
about a 50 percent mortality rate among those known to be infected, the
overall death toll could reach 10,000 in the worst-case scenario.
"I think that's completely unacceptable," said the agency's emergency operations director, Dr. Bruce Aylward.
The WHO's new plan would cost $489 million to support 750 international health workers and 12,000 national ones. It aims to:
— stop Ebola transmission in affected countries within six to nine months
— prevent the spread of any new infections within eight weeks of a case being identified anywhere in the world
—
and improve the public health responses to Ebola in any nation with
major transportation hubs or borders shared with affected countries.
With the world's support, medical workers hope to take "the heat out of this outbreak" within three months, Aylward said.
The
U.N. agency's announcement was immediately criticized by Doctors
Without Borders, a medical charity running many of the treatment centers
in West Africa.
"The WHO
road map is welcome, but it should not give a false sense of hope. A
plan needs to be acted upon. Huge questions remain," the charity's
operations director, Bruce de le Vingne, said in a statement. "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."
Containment is key, but it has to be done carefully, in ways that don't cause panic or hamper the response, the agency said.
The
WHO has supported the quarantine of sick people, and said cordoning off
entire neighborhoods can be useful, as long as civil rights are
respected. But it has called on airlines to resume flights to affected
countries, since Ebola is unlikely to spread through air travel. Health
checks at airports should provide sufficient protection while still
enabling humanitarian workers to get in.
"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.
Ebola
and the measures used to control it are making it harder for some of
the world's poorest people to feed themselves and seek medical care.
Many thousands of people have been cut off from markets; food prices
have soared and farmers are separated from their fields. People now
fearing hospitals are going without treatment for other diseases, like
malaria, which kills around 600,000 each year, 90 percent of them in
Africa.
The World Food
Program says it needs $70 million immediately to help feed 1.3 million
people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the coming months because
control measures have threatened food supplies.
Nigerian
authorities, meanwhile, confirmed their first fatality outside the
commercial capital of Lagos, where a dying Liberian-American airline
passenger infected others in late July. They said a man sickened after
coming into contact with the passenger had evaded surveillance and
infected a doctor in southern Nigeria, who later died.
---
Larson
reported from Dakar, Senegal. Seth Borenstein in Washington; Bashir
Adigun in Abuja, Nigeria; Sarah DiLorenzo in Dakar; and Maria Cheng in
London contributed to this report.
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