Voice of America News: The head of the World Health Organization has told the presidents of West African nations stricken by Ebola that the outbreak is moving faster than efforts to control it. Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO's director general, says if the outbreak continues to worsen, the consequences could be "catastrophic" in terms of lost lives and socio-economic disruption.Chan is in Conakry, where she met Friday with the presidents of Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast. WHO and the West African leaders are finalizing a $100 million plan to fight the spread of Ebola, which has claimed nearly 730 lives. Chan said more than 60 health workers are among the victims, and that some international relief workers have been infected.
The WHO chief said her hope is the plan emerging from the Conakry meeting will mark "a turning point" in the international response to the outbreak. Several hundred medical personnel are about to be deployed to West Africa, Chan said, and an emergency committee will meet on Wednesday to assess the international implications of the outbreak.
Referring to the scale of the ongoing Ebola outbreak as unprecedented, WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told VOA the outbreak is probably worse than the figures indicate. “There could well be cases in the community that we have missed because this has been one of the biggest challenges in terms of also tracing contacts," Hartl said. "People run away. They do not want to be treated in the health centers. They are afraid or they do not believe that the health centers can do them any good, so they try to be treated by their families and they get sick and die there.”
Hartl says key elements of the emergency plan are to stop transmission of the Ebola virus and to prevent the spread of the disease to neighboring at-risk countries by strengthening and scaling up all control and response measures....
An electronmicrograph of the Ebola virus, image by Cynthia Goldsmith at the CDC, public domain
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