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August 29, 2014

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WHO warns Ebola cases could top 20,000

Source: AFP | August 29, 2014, Friday | Print Edition

Program Code: 0909346140805010 | Souce:CNTV

EBOLA-HIT nations met for crisis talks yesterday as the death toll topped 1,500 and the World Health Organization warned that the number of cases could exceed 20,000 before the outbreak is stemmed.

Nigeria announced that the virus had reached its oil-producing hub, dashing hopes that the country had contained it to its biggest city, Lagos.

Hopes were raised meanwhile of a vaccine for the hemorrhagic fever after British medical charity the Wellcome Trust and pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline said trials on a new drug could begin next month.

But new figures from the WHO showed the scale of the crisis. It said it was working on an assumption that it would take six to nine months to bring the epidemic under control, by which time the number of infections could have passed 20,000.

“That’s not saying we expect 20,000, that’s not saying we would accept, more importantly, 20,000 cases,” Bruce Aylward, the WHO’s head of emergency programmes, told reporters in Geneva.

“But we have got to have a system that is robust enough to deal with ... a very bad case scenario,” he added.

As of August 26, 1,552 people had been confirmed dead from Ebola in four countries — Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Nigeria — while 3,062 had been infected.

But Aylward warned that the actual caseload could be “two to four times higher than the number of cases you see reported.”

Health ministers from member states of the West African regional bloc ECOWAS were meeting yesterday in the Ghanaian capital Accra to discuss how to strengthen its response to the devastating outbreak.

As the meeting began, Nigeria’s health minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said a doctor in the southeastern city of Port Harcourt had become the sixth person to die of Ebola and the first outside Lagos.

The medic died on August 22, a day after treating a patient who had contact with the Liberian-American man who brought the virus to Nigeria and who died in Lagos on July 25.

The patient, an ECOWAS official, slipped through the net and travelled to Port Harcourt where he saw the doctor in a hotel room after feeling unwell, Chukwu said in Abuja.

Port Harcourt, 435 kilometers east of Lagos and the capital of Rivers state, is the centre of Nigeria’s oil industry and a base for several international companies, including Anglo-Dutch giant Shell, US firm Chevron and France’s Total.

A spokesman for Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary said they were “monitoring the Ebola outbreak very closely and liaising with health authorities.”

On an Ebola vaccine, researchers said they hoped safety trials on 140 healthy volunteers in Oxford, the Gambia and Mali could finish by the end of the year, with scope for GSK to make some 10,000 extra doses.

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