World Health
Organization says thousands of new cases are imminent as efforts to fight
outbreak fall woefully short.
The World
Health Organization has warned that Liberia is set to see a huge spike in
infections from the Ebola epidemic ravaging west Africa, with thousands of new
cases imminent.
The UN agency
on Monday said the country, worst-hit in the outbreak with almost 1,100 deaths,
faced “many thousands” of new infections in the next three weeks.
“WHO and its
director-general will continue to advocate for more Ebola treatment beds in
Liberia and elsewhere, and will hold the world accountable for responding to
this dire emergency with its unprecedented dimensions of human suffering,” it
said in a statement.
The deadliest
Ebola epidemic the world has ever seen is spreading across west Africa, with
Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone the countries worst affected.
The death
toll has topped 2,000, out of nearly 4,000 people infected.
Liberia
already accounts for about half of all cases and deaths, and “the number of new
cases is increasing exponentially”, the WHO warned.
Key
development partners trying to help Liberia respond to the outbreak “need to
prepare to scale up their current efforts by three- to four-fold,” it added.
The countries
bearing the brunt of the epidemic are among the world’s poorest, with
dilapidated medical infrastructures that have all but buckled under the strain
of trying to contain the virus.
Before the
outbreak, Liberia had only one doctor to treat every 100,000 patients in a
total population of 4.4 million people.
Now that 152
healthcare workers in the country have been infected and 79 have died, the WHO
said the ratio had worsened significantly.
“Every
infection or death of a doctor or nurse depletes response capacity
significantly,” it said.
No treatment
bed
The UN body
described how taxis filled with entire families, including members suspected of
having Ebola, criss-crossed Monrovia “searching for a treatment bed”.
“There are
none. As WHO staff in Liberia confirm, no free beds for Ebola treatment exist
anywhere in the country.”
When Ebola
patients are turned away from treatment centres, “they have no choice but to
return to their communities and homes, where they inevitably infect others,
perpetuating constantly higher flare-ups in the number of cases,” it said.
In
Montserrado county alone, which includes Monrovia, the agency said 1,000 beds
were urgently needed to treat Ebola patients.
In the
scramble to halt the contagion, some affected countries have quarantined whole
regions, while others so far free of the virus have halted flights.
Nkosazana
Dlamini-Zuma, chief of the African Union Commission, called on Monday for
travel bans imposed to stem the epidemic to be lifted, “to open up economic
activities”.
She told a
crisis meeting in Addis Ababa there was an urgent need to “craft a united,
comprehensive and collective African response” to the outbreak.
But she also
warned that in the battle to stop the spread, “we must be careful not to
introduce measures that may have more… social and economic impact than the
disease itself”.
Experts have
warned that economic losses caused by the restrictions were adding to the
continent’s woes, with some arguing that travel bans even slowed medical help
getting to affected areas.