AFP – The Ebola epidemic is moving faster than the authorities can handle and could take six months to bring under control, the medical charity MSF said Friday.
The warning came a day after the World Health Organization said the scale of the epidemic had been vastly underestimated and that “extraordinary measures” were needed to contain the killer disease.
The UN health agency said the death toll from the worst outbreak of Ebola in four decades had now climbed to 1,145 in the four afflicted West African countries — Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.
“It is deteriorating faster, and moving faster, than we can respond to,” Joanne Liu, the chief of Doctors without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, told reporters in Geneva.
She added that it could take six months to get the upper hand.
“It is like wartime,” she said a day after returning from the region. “I don’t think we should focus on numbers. To really get a reality check, we’re not talking in terms of weeks, but months” to control the epidemic.”
Elhadj As Sy, the new head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, painted a similarly bleak picture after he too returned from west Africa.
“In Sierra Leone, we’ve already lost some of the best doctors, including one of the best virologists of the country — and not only of the country, but of the region. Nurses have been infected and also died,” he said.
As Sy added that he agreed with MSF’s six-month timeline for bringing the outbreak under control.
The WHO said Thursday it was coordinating “a massive scaling up of the international response” to the epidemic.
“Staff at the outbreak sites see evidence that the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak,” it said.
The epidemic erupted in the forested zone straddling the borders of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia earlier this year, and later spread to Nigeria.
Liu said while Guinea was the initial epicentre of the disease, the pace there has slowed, with fears now focused on the other countries.
“If we don’t stabilise Liberia, we’ll never stabilise the region,” Liu said.
