West Africa and Ebola

Posted by Jack

The epidemic has killed more than 2,400 people in five African countries and now poses a threat to Liberia’s “national existence,” according to its defense minister. The World Health Organization says the epidemic’s growth has been “exponential” in recent weeks, especially in Liberia.

The Doctors Without Borders center in Paynesville, on the outskirts of Monrovia, has 160 beds and is scheduled to add 25 on Monday. It needs 1,200 — and a corresponding increase in staff — to cope with the epidemic, said Sophie-Jane Madden, a spokeswoman for the organization. As Ebola begins to race through this city, that number is certain to increase.

Ebola is spreading faster than it’s possible for healthcare workers to keep up. At the current time 2400 dead may seem like a relatively small number compared to combat casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Chad to name but a few in either in or near civil war. Ebola hits harder than the 1918 flu, but it’s also harder to transmit and that is about the only thing working for the medical teams. Despite the recent arrival of western medical missionaries and containment experts, they are woefully understaffed to meet the actual needs.

The big question on the minds of doctors is, What happens if this insidious disease continues to spread at it’s current rate? How long do we have before it’s unstoppable and will have to burn itself out? The answers are not easy to hear because they are so cataclysmic. If the virus were to continue at the current transmission rate of 1.4 to 1.7 people for each newly person infected, West Africa could gain an additional 77,181 to 277,124 cases by the end of 2014, a recent study by Chowell-Puente said. But, ebola has defied containment because the healthcare conditions and medical awareness on the African continent are so poor that if this trajectory is not altered deaths in 2015 will great exceed the current projections.

Could it spread to Europe and beyond? A scientist who helped discover the deadly Ebola virus has said the current outbreak is ‘extremely unlikely’ to spread to Europe.

Professor Peter Piot, who was part of the team that discovered the virus in 1976, said that the likelihood the epidemic could spread in the UK was “very, very, very low”.