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The Ebola virus is spreading exponentially in Liberia, the World Health Organisation warned today.
The organisation said that motorbike-taxis and regular taxis are "a hot source of potential virus transmission" because they are not disinfected in Liberia, where conventional Ebola control measures "are not having an adequate impact".
The United Nations agency said aid partners needed to scale up efforts against Ebola by three- to fourfold in Liberia and elsewhere in West African countries battling the epidemic....
"The number of new cases is moving far faster than the capacity to manage them in Ebola-specific treatment centres," it said. "Many thousands of new cases are expected in Liberia over the coming three weeks."
Paris (AFP) - More than 22 million people live in parts of Africa where conditions exist for the Ebola virus to jump from animals to humans, a bigger area than previously thought, researchers said Monday.
While the actual risk of animal-to-human or "zoonotic" transmission is low -- with just 30 confirmed cases in history -- the wide geographic spread boosts the potential for future human outbreaks, which always start with the virus crossing the species barrier, they said.
The risk area covers countries as far north on the continent as Nigeria and as far south as Mozambique, the team of disease specialists wrote in the journal eLife.
People can in very rare cases contract the virus from handling or eating infected animals like bats, chimpanzees or gorillas, and then infect other people.
Human-to-human transmission of the haemorrhagic fever-causing virus with a death rate of up to 90 percent is not easy either -- it requires direct contact with the body fluids of an infected person or corpse.
“Transmission of the Ebola virus in Liberia is already intense and the number of new cases is increasing exponentially,” WHO said in a statement.
“In Monrovia, taxis filled with entire families, of whom some members are thought to be infected with the Ebola virus, crisscross the city, searching for a treatment bed. There are none. As WHO staff in Liberia confirm, no free beds for Ebola treatment exist anywhere in the country.”
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For example, in Montserrado county, 1,000 beds are urgently needed but only 240 beds are available. WHO has said more than 3,600 people have been infected with Ebola in this West African epidemic, and 2,000 have died, but the organization predicts as many as 20,000 will be sickened before it’s over. Half of those infected have been dying.
“According to a WHO staff member who has been in Liberia for the past several weeks, motorbike-taxis and regular taxis are a hot source of potential Ebola virus transmission, as these vehicles are not disinfected at all, much less before new passengers are taken on board,” WHO said.
“When patients are turned away at Ebola treatment centers, they have no choice but to return to their communities and homes, where they inevitably infect others, perpetuating constantly higher flare-ups in the number of cases.”
Cases of Ebola in West Africa are continuing to rise exponentially, with Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone together experiencing a 49% increase in cases in just the last three weeks. New data released Tuesday by the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that there are now a total of 4,269 cases in the three countries, including 2,288 deaths. Liberia alone has experienced a 68% increase in cases in the last three weeks. Localized clusters of Ebola have also been emerging in Nigeria and Senegal, where authorities have reported a combined total of 24 cases and eight deaths.
People wait to be admitted into an Ebola treatment facility in Monrovia, Liberia
On Monday, the WHO released data on the troubling number of cases in Liberia, citing concerns that families riding in taxis or motorbikes to hospitals are spreading disease that way. Fourteen of Liberia’s 15 counties now have confirmed cases of the disease, and so far 152 health care workers have been infected, with 79 dying from the disease. The organization says it expects thousands of new cases in the next three weeks, and has called for all involved parties to at a minimum, triple their efforts. Also on Tuesday, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) announced that it is helping the African Union mobilize an additional 100 African health workers to help fight the outbreak with $10 million of funding. So far the U.S. has spent a reported $100 million responding to the outbreak.
The WHO has said that Liberia in particular needs better ideas for containing the disease. “Conventional Ebola control interventions are not having an adequate impact in Liberia, though they appear to be working elsewhere in areas of limited transmission, most notably in Nigeria, Senegal, and the Democratic Republic of Congo,” the WHO wrote in a recent update. Dr. Kent Brantly, one of the American Ebola survivors who was infected in Liberia, agrees that regular methods aren’t working there. In an essay for TIME, Brantly wrote: “People are fearful of isolation units because “that is where you go to die.”…Perhaps we need to find a way to provide safe home care that protects the caregivers.” Meanwhile in the U.S., Emory University Hospital received a third Ebola patient to its isolation unit on Tuesday morning. This is the fourth patient to be evacuated from West Africa to be treated with the disease in the U.S.
Ebola Cases in West Africa Top 4 200
"Liberia is facing a serious threat to its national existence. The deadly Ebola virus has caused a disruption of the normal functioning of our State," said Liberian Minister of National Defense Brownie Samukai.
"It is now spreading like wild fire, devouring everything in its path. The already weak health infrastructure of the country has been overwhelmed," he told the 15-member council, adding that the initial international response was "less than robust."
U.N. special envoy to Liberia Karin Landgren told the council that at least 160 Liberian health care workers had contracted the disease and half of them had died. She described the spread of Ebola as "merciless" and warned that the reported cases and deaths in Liberia "understate Ebola's true toll."
"The speed and scale of the loss of lives, and the economic, social, political and security reverberations of the crisis are affecting Liberia profoundly," she said. "Liberians are facing their gravest threat since war."
Research by the University of Oxford compared historic outbreaks to the virus’ possible transmission in bats and chimpanzees to predict how the disease could spread through its vast animal reservoir.
It is the first time scientists have attempted to explain how the virus, which is contracted through contact with infected bodily fluids, has travelled westward across Africa.
The resulting map shows how the populations of the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ghana and a dozen more countries could be hit by the outbreak, which has already killed nearly 2,300 people in 2014. ...
According to the Oxford study, Cote D’Ivoire, Gabon, Angola, Tanzania, Togo, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Burundi, Equatorial Guinea, Madagascar and Malawi could also join those countries already affected.
More than 1,000 people have so far died in Liberia, where the country’s Defence Minister Brownie Samukai has said the disease threatens the country's very existence.
"Liberia is facing a serious threat to its national existence. The deadly Ebola virus has caused a disruption of the normal functioning of our State," he said yesterday.
There are two possible future chapters to this story that should keep us up at night.
The first possibility is that the Ebola virus spreads from West Africa to megacities in other regions of the developing world. This outbreak is very different from the 19 that have occurred in Africa over the past 40 years. It is much easier to control Ebola infections in isolated villages. But there has been a 300 percent increase in Africa’s population over the last four decades, much of it in large city slums. What happens when an infected person yet to become ill travels by plane to Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasa or Mogadishu — or even Karachi, Jakarta, Mexico City or Dhaka?
The second possibility is one that virologists are loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private: that an Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air. You can now get Ebola only through direct contact with bodily fluids. But viruses like Ebola are notoriously sloppy in replicating, meaning the virus entering one person may be genetically different from the virus entering the next. The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years. Each new infection represents trillions of throws of the genetic dice.
If certain mutations occurred, it would mean that just breathing would put one at risk of contracting Ebola. Infections could spread quickly to every part of the globe, as the H1N1 influenza virus did in 2009, after its birth in Mexico.
Why are public officials afraid to discuss this? They don’t want to be accused of screaming “Fire!” in a crowded theater — as I’m sure some will accuse me of doing. But the risk is real, and until we consider it, the world will not be prepared to do what is necessary to end the epidemic.
In 2012, a team of Canadian researchers proved that Ebola Zaire, the same virus that is causing the West Africa outbreak, could be transmitted by the respiratory route from pigs to monkeys, both of whose lungs are very similar to those of humans. Richard Preston’s 1994 best seller “The Hot Zone” chronicled a 1989 outbreak of a different strain, Ebola Reston virus, among monkeys at a quarantine station near Washington. The virus was transmitted through breathing, and the outbreak ended only when all the monkeys were euthanized. We must consider that such transmissions could happen between humans, if the virus mutates.
Just think how cool it would be if we had even a small outbreak of the disease somewhere in the US! Then, you could cash in on all this effort.
Just think how cool it would be if we had even a small outbreak of the disease somewhere in the US! Then, you could cash in on all this effort.
You are disgusting. I am not setting up to make any money on this, you fucking retard.
If the thread is so trivial to you, then go the fuck away, jack ass.
I'm still amazed that no one in Duncan's immediate family came down with it.
I'm still amazed that no one in Duncan's immediate family came down with it.
Apparently he wasn't quite as surprised about being infected as the media thought at the time. The hospital nurse who appeared on 60 minutes said that Duncan confessed the "landlord's daughter" was in fact his own daughter, whom he not only helped into a taxi but whose funeral he also attended. He knew what she had; and he knew he had an excellent chance of being infected.
Since Louise wasn't infected, we can probably guess that she wasn't intimate with Duncan, and may not have been intending to marry him for any other reason than to make him eligible for citizenship. Louise's daughter, Youngor Jallah, describes handing Duncan things while holding only the very edge at outstretched arm's length; and he apparently took care of all his own messes while he was experiencing the worst of the disease.
He probably deserves some credit for that. He may have brought Ebola to the US, and he certainly lied about his exposure to it... but he had to have done his best to avoid infecting anyone else in that apartment, and it couldn't have been easy.
--- Paravani
