adminGENEVA/LONDON. — The number of Ebola cases in a vast outbreak in West Africa will go over 9 000 this week and the epidemic is still expanding geographically in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said yesterday.The death toll so far in the outbreak, first reported in Guinea in March, has reached 4 447 from a total of 8 914 cases, said WHO assistant director general Bruce Aylward.
While there are signs of rates of infection slowing in some of the worst-hit areas, Aylward said the disease has now reached “more districts, counties and prefectures” than it had a month ago, and said case numbers would continue to rise.
“We will go over 9 000 cases this week,” he told reporters from the WHO’s Geneva headquarters. “In certain areas were seeing disease coming down but that doesn’t mean they’re going to go to zero.”
He stressed it would be “really, really premature” to read any success into the apparent slowing numbers in some areas.
Meanwhile, dozens of Ebola survivors, now immune to the deadly disease, will meet in Sierra Leone this week to see how they can help tackle the epidemic, the UN said yesterday.
They can assist sufferers because they have experienced the stigmatisation caused by the disease and have endured being treated in an isolation ward, Christophe Boulierac, spokesperson for the UN’s children’s aid agency Unicef, said.
The survivors will gather today and tomorrow in Kemena, in southeast Sierra Leone.
“It’s an innovative move to enlist people who are immune to Ebola in Sierra Leone in the fight against the disease. It will bring together 35 people who recovered from Ebola, and some practitioners,” Boulierac told reporters in Geneva. — Reuters/AFP.
Peter Tanyanyiwa
Online Reporter