More than 1,900 people have now died in West Africa’s Ebola outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.
There have been 3,500 confirmed or probable cases in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
“The outbreaks are racing ahead of the control efforts in these countries,” WHO chief Margaret Chan said.
The WHO is meeting next Thursday to examine the most promising treatments and to discuss how to fast-track testing and production. Disease control experts, medical researchers, officials from affected countries, and specialists in medical ethics will all be represented at the meeting in Geneva.
At least $600m (£360m) are needed to fight the virus, and more than 20,000 people could be infected before the outbreak is brought under control, the WHO has warned.
Ms Chan described the outbreak as “the largest and most severe and most complex we have ever seen”.
“No-one, even outbreak responders with experience dating back to 1976, to 1995, people that were directly involved with those outbreaks, none of them have ever seen anything like it,” she said.
More than 40 per cent of the deaths have occurred in three weeks leading up to 3 September, the WHO says, indicating that the epidemic is fast outpacing efforts to control it.
On Wednesday, Nigeria reported two further cases in the city of Port Harcourt.
There had previously only been one case outside the city of Lagos, where five people have died from the virus.
The outbreak is having a knock-on effect as far away as Thailand, where sailors are becoming fearful of sailing to Africa, affecting shipments of rice. Vichai Sriprasert, of the Thai Rice Exporters Association, told the BBC that crews are afraid to go to Africa because of the threat of Ebola – despite evidence that infection and death is unlikely. West Africa imports millions of tons of rice, much of it from Thailand. The cut in demand is hitting the price of rice in Thailand and affecting farmers, he said.
“The outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Port Harcourt has the potential to grow larger and spread faster than the one in Lagos,” the WHO warned.
Also on Wednesday, the first British person to contract Ebola during the outbreak was discharged from hospital after making a full recovery. On Tuesday medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) warned that a global military intervention was needed to combat the outbreak.
MSF condemned the global response so far as “lethally inadequate” and said the world was “losing the battle” to contain the outbreak. It has called for military and civilian teams capable of dealing with a biological disaster to be deployed immediately, as well as for more field hospitals with isolation wards to be set up, trained healthcare workers to be sent to the region and air support to move patients and medics across West Africa.
The Ebola outbreak in Port Harcourt could spread wider and faster than in Lagos, the WHO warned yesterday. The UN health body said the virus’ arrival in Port Harcourt, 435 kilometres east of Lagos and home to oil and gas majors such as Shell, Total and Chevron, showed “multiple high-risk opportunities for transmission of the virus to others”.
Until the Port Harcourt case was announced, Nigeria’s government had indicated that the virus was contained in Lagos. Nigerian authorities are monitoring nearly 400 people for signs of Ebola after they came in contact with a Port Harcourt doctor who died of the disease but hid the fact that he had been exposed, a senior Nigerian health official said on Thursday.
Dr. Abdulsalami Nasidi, project director at Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, said there was a sense of “hopelessness” due to the lack of proven drugs or vaccines to treat Ebola that has infected 18 people in Africa’s most populous nation.
He said that more isolation wards were being opened in the oil industry hub but voiced confidence that there would not be “many cases” there.
After having contact with an Ebola patient and before his own death on August 22, the Port Harcourt doctor, named by local authorities as Iyke Enemuo, carried on treating patients and met scores of friends, relatives and medics, leaving about 60 of them at high risk of infection, the World Health Organisation said on Wednesday.
The doctor’s wife, who is also a physician, and a patient in the same hospital have been infected with Ebola, the WHO said.
“Everything about this doctor was in secrecy, he violated our public health laws by treating a patient with a highly pathogenic agent who revealed to him that he had contact with Ebola and didn’t want to be treated in Lagos because he might be put in isolation,” Nasidi said.
“He treated him in secrecy outside hospital premises. When he became ill he did not reveal to his colleagues that he had contact with someone who contracted Ebola. He was taken to General Hospital, a private hospital that sees everybody.
“That is the only case that effectively escaped our surveillance network. We are paying now for it,” Nasidi said. He spoke on the sidelines of a two-day WHO experts meeting aimed at speeding development of Ebola drugs and vaccines.
The United Nations said $600 million (Dh2.2 billion) in supplies would be needed to fight West Africa’s Ebola outbreak, as the death toll from the worst ever epidemic of the virus topped 1,900 and Guinea warned it had penetrated a new part of the country. The pace of the infection has accelerated, and there were close to 400 deaths in the past week, officials said on Wednesday. It was first detected deep in the forests of southeastern Guinea in March.
The haemorrhagic fever has spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria, and Senegal, and has killed more people than all outbreaks since Ebola was first uncovered in 1976. There are no approved Ebola vaccines or treatments.
An experimental Ebola vaccine that Canada said it would give to the World Health Organisation for use in Africa was as of Wednesday still in the lab that developed it as officials are puzzled over how to transport it.
Ottawa said on August 12 that it would donate between 800 and 1,000 doses of the vaccine, being held at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.
“We are now working with the WHO to address complex regulatory, logistical and ethical issues so that the vaccine can be safely and ethically deployed as rapidly as possible,” Health Canada spokesman Sean Upton said in a statement.
“For example, the logistics surrounding the safe delivery of the vaccine are complicated.” Upton said one of the challenges was keeping the vaccine cool enough to remain potent. Human safety trials are due to begin this week on a vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline Plc and later this year on one from NewLink Genetics Corp.
The US Department of Health and Human Services said on Tuesday a federal contract worth up to $42.3 million would help accelerate testing of an experimental Ebola virus treatment being developed by privately held Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc.
Dr. David Nabarro, senior UN Coordinator for Ebola, said the cost of getting the supplies needed by West Africa countries to control the crisis would amount to $600 million. That was higher than an estimate of $490 million by the WHO last week.
Moving workers and supplies around the region has been made difficult by restrictions by some countries on air travel and landing rights as they try to control Ebola’s spread.
“We are working intensively with those governments to encourage them to commit to the movement of people and planes and at the same time deal with anxieties about the possibility of infection,” Nabarro said.
He said the president of Ghana has agreed to allow an air bridge, or route, through the country to affected regions to move people and supplies.
Ivory Coast, which closed its borders with Liberia and Guinea last month, said on Tuesday it would open humanitarian and economic corridors to its two western neighbours.
WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan told a news conference in Washington, “This Ebola epidemic is the longest, the most severe and the most complex we’ve ever seen.” Chan said there were more than 3,500 cases across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Amid shortages of equipment and trained staff, more than 120 health care workers have died in West Africa in the Ebola outbreak. The Liberian government has begun offering a $1,000 bonus to any health care workers who agreed to work in Ebola treatment facilities.
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