The Ebola epidemic gripping West Africa will get worse before it gets
better, the head of the United States' top health body has warned, as
health ministers from affected nations held crisis talks.The
director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Tom Frieden,
said there was no quick fix to what the World Health Organisation has
called an "unprecedented" outbreak and called for "urgent action".
A
total of 1 427 people have died from Ebola since the start of the year,
with 2 615 people infected. Most of the deaths have been in Sierra
Leone, Liberia and Guinea, with a handful of cases in Nigeria.
But
the WHO, medical charities treating the sick and dying and others
believe those figures are likely to be far too low because of community
resistance to outside medical staff and a lack of access to infected
areas.
Longer-term threat
Frieden told a
news conference in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, on Wednesday evening:
"The cases are increasing. I wish I did not have to say this but it is
going to get worse before it gets better."
His comments, which
follow other warnings about the longer-term threat posed by the outbreak
and the need for a better global response, came as health ministers of
the West African regional bloc Ecowas gathered in Ghana.
The
Economic Community of West African States said the talks in Accra, aimed
to strengthen its members' response to the epidemic.
Ebola, which
claimed the life of one Ecowas official in Nigeria's financial capital,
Lagos, was "a threat to regional and global public health safety as
well as the economic and social security of the affected countries", it
said in a statement.
Isolation concerns
There
has been mounting concern about the effect of the most lethal outbreak
of the tropical virus in history after airlines stopped international
flights to the crisis zone.
On Wednesday, Air France became the
latest carrier to announce a suspension of its services to Sierra Leone,
while British Airways said it was stopping its flights to Freetown and
Monrovia until next year.
Royal Air Morocco is now the only
airline providing a regular service for both capitals, although the
company said that flights were only about 10 percent full from
Casablanca.
The United Nations' envoy on Ebola, David Nabarro,
this week criticised airlines for scrapping flights, warning that
Ebola-hit countries faced increased isolation and made it harder for the
UN to carry out its work.
Liberia has been worst hit by the
outbreak, with 624 deaths recorded. Sporadic violence, including against
hospitals treating Ebola patients, has been seen and some areas of the
city placed under quarantine.
Elsewhere, there have been warnings of food shortages in affected countries.
Last
week, the Democratic Republic of Congo said 13 people had died with
symptoms of an unspecified haemmorrhagic fever. It later confirmed two
Ebola cases but said they were unrelated to the West African epidemic.
The
UN on Wednesday announced that it was giving Kinshasa $1.5m to help the
country fight the disease, which has seen seven outbreaks since it was
first identified in the country in 1976.
Positive signs
The
WHO has said that it was encouraged by the response from Guinea and
Nigeria, where far fewer cases of Ebola have been recorded than in
Sierra Leone and Liberia and public awareness about the virus was
higher.
The UN's Nabarro on Wednesday evening met Nigeria's
President Goodluck Jonathan and said the country's health authorities
had "performed excellently" in controlling the spread.
Five people
have died from Ebola out of 13 confirmed cases, all of them in the
financial capital, Lagos, while seven have been successfully treated and
released from hospital. And another victim was confirmed to have died
in the oil city of Port Harcourt on Thursday.
Nigeria's health
minister Onyebuchi Chukwu, however, warned that there was no room for
complacency, despite only one patient remaining in isolation with the
virus.
"Nigeria has been successful at containment. But have we
eliminated the disease? No," he told reporters, likening the situation
to trapping a wild animal in a cage.
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