Ebola cases could exceed 20,000 before outbreak is stemmed: UN

GENEVA, Thursday
The World Health Organisation said today it aimed to reverse the spread of Ebola within three months, but warned that the caseload in West Africa’s epidemic could eventually top 20,000.

In a new anti-Ebola plan, the UN health agency said it aimed to reverse the trend within three months, with the final aim of stopping “all residual transmission within 6-9 months”.

It said the current case-count — 3,062, with 1,552 deaths — was likely several times lower than the actual number, and that the number of infections “could exceed 20,000 over the course of this emergency”.

“This Roadmap assumes that in many areas of intense transmission the actual number of cases may be 2-4 fold higher than that currently reported,” it said.

“It acknowledges that the aggregate case load of (Ebola) could exceed 20,000 over the course of this emergency,” it added.

The plan called for a massive ramping up of efforts to contain and defeat the epidemic.
It put a price tag of $490 million on a six-month campaign, saying the money would need to come from WHO coffers as well as other aid agencies and governments.

“This indicative budget does not include the costs of broader support for essential services in the countries worst affected, nor the costs of health systems recovery and strengthening in these areas,” it noted.

In another development, safety trials on an Ebola vaccine are being fast-tracked, meaning it could be given to healthy volunteers as early as September, researchers said today.

The vaccine will be given to volunteers in Britain, the Gambia and Mali in a bid to tackle the spread of an epidemic which has spread across west Africa, killing 1,552 so far.

Researchers hope the trials could finish by the end of 2014.

If they are successful, the vaccine could then be given to people infected with Ebola, which is spread through bodily fluids.

The move was announced by pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline — which is developing the vaccine with the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) — and London-based medical charity Wellcome Trust, which is contributing to a grant to pay for the trials.

“A candidate Ebola vaccine could be given to healthy volunteers in the UK, the Gambia and Mali as early as September, as part of a series of safety trials of potential vaccines,” the statement said.

Meanwhile, Nigeria today said that a doctor had died from Ebola in the southeastern oil city of Port Harcourt in the first case of the deadly virus outside the country’s biggest city, Lagos.

Health minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said the medic died on August 22 after treating a patient who had contact with Liberian-American Patrick Sawyer, who brought the virus to Nigeria and who died in a Lagos hospital on July 25.

“Following the report of this death by the doctor’s widow the next day, the case had been thoroughly investigated and laboratory analysis showed that this doctor died from EVD (Ebola Virus Disease),” he told reporters in the capital Abuja.

The latest case brings to six the number of people who have died from the haemorrhagic fever in Nigeria. Fifteen people have now been confirmed to have the disease.

On Wednesday, Chukwu had said that the virus was contained as there were no cases outside Lagos but warned against complacency in fighting the disease.

News that a doctor died 435 kilometres away will raise fears about the spread of the virus, just as Nigerians began to think that they had stopped Ebola in its tracks.

CENTRE OF OIL INDUSTRY

Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers state, is the centre of Nigeria’s oil industry and home to a number of oil giants, including Anglo-Dutch giant Shell, France’s Total and US firm Chevron.

Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer, churning out roughly two million barrels a day, with crude accounting for more than 90 percent of its foreign exchange earnings.

Residents in Port Harcourt said they were shocked and scared by the arrival of Ebola and called on the state government to tackle the virus.

“Port Harcourt plays host to a lot of people, including foreigners. All efforts should be made to check the spread of the virus,” said local student Lucy Ekeh.

Chukwu said the patient, an official with the ECOWAS regional bloc who took Sawyer to hospital after he arrived unwell at Lagos airport on July 20, managed to evade detection and went to Port Harcourt in the last week of July.

Another ECOWAS official died of Ebola, the bloc announced on August 12. His colleague saw the doctor who died in Port Harcourt in a city hotel room after showing Ebola-like symptoms, Rivers State health commissioner Sampson Parker said separately.

Meanwhile, Ebola-hit nations met for crisis talks today.
A spokesman for Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary said they were “monitoring the Ebola outbreak very closely and liaising with health authorities on the steps being taken to contain the disease”.

The director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Tom Frieden, said on Wednesday “urgent action” was needed to address what the WHO has called an “unprecedented” outbreak.

Dr Frieden told a news conference in the Liberian capital, Monrovia: “The cases are increasing. I wish I did not have to say this but it is going to get worse before it gets better.” (AFP)