Between 550,000 and 1.4m would be infected with the Ebola virus by January 20, 2015.
Financial Times
Javier Blas – Africa Editor
The
deadly Ebola virus could infect up to 1.4m people in west Africa by
January, according to a new US projection that is the most apocalyptic
yet for an outbreak that has so far confounded international efforts to
tackle it.
The
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a report
published yesterday its worst case scenario for the outbreak was that
between 550,000 and 1.4m would be infected with the Ebola virus by
January 20, 2015.
“If
conditions continue without scale-up of interventions, cases will
continue to double approximately every 20 days, and the number of cases
in west Africa will rapidly reach extraordinary levels,” the CDC report
stated.
Tom
Frieden, director of the CDC in Atlanta, said it was still possible to
reverse the epidemic, but only “if a sufficient number of all patients
are effectively isolated, either in Ebola treatment units or in other
settings, such as community-based or home care”.
The report by US authorities came as a group of scientists published a study in The New England Journal of Medicine warning that the Ebola outbreak was “unprecedented in scale” and urging greater international effort to tackle it.
The
scientific report, authored by experts from the WHO and Imperial
College London, suggests the international community is still playing
down the size of the outbreak, as non-governmental organisations have
warned.
Médecins
Sans Frontières, which has a long history of battling Ebola in Africa,
has been warning for months that the outbreak is out of control. The US and several other countries
have responded by offering aid, including the deployment of military
units into the region. But experts believe far more is needed.
The
outbreak has focused attention on how little progress has been made on
tackling Ebola since it was first identified 38 years ago in a patient
in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since then, the
haemorrhagic fever has become notorious for its gruesome symptoms,
including vomiting, diarrhoea and internal and external bleeding.
Ebola
has a fatality rate of up to 90 per cent and there is no cure. The
current outbreak has a fatality rate of about 50 per cent. The WHO said
on Monday that the death toll had reached 2,803, with 5,843 infected.
“The current epidemic of [Ebola] is far larger than all previous
epidemics combined,” the researchers said.
The
outbreak started in December in a remote forest region of Guinea and
has expanded into Sierra Leone and Libera. Nigeria and Senegal have
suffered a few cases, but authorities believe the situation there is
largely contained. More than half the deaths have occurred in Liberia.
Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia are battling the disease with few
resources, and at least 151 healthcare workers have been killed by the
virus. The researchers said the 600 or so beds available for Ebola
patients in the three most affected nations were lower than the number
of cases – nearly 1,000 – emerging each week.
Barack Obama, US president, said earlier this month that the international community needed to act quickly to fight the outbreak