.World Health Organisation says Epidemic is vastly under-estimated

It will take about six months to bring under control the Ebola epidemic in West Africa which feels like “wartime” and requires greater leadership from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the head of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said on Friday.

Joanne Liu, international president of MSF (Doctors Without Borders), told a news briefing in Geneva after a 10-day trip to the region: “If we don’t stabilise Liberia, we will never stabilise the region”.

“Over the next six months we should get the upper hand on the epidemic, this is my gut feeling,” she said, adding more experts were needed on the ground.

The statement came as the World Health Organisation reported that the scale of the epidemic in West Africa has been ‘vastly under-estimated”, adding that extra-ordinary measures are needed to contain the disease.

Ebola screening at Lagos Airport. TheNation Photo

The Geneva-based WHO said in a statement it was coordinating “a massive scaling up of the international response”, in a bid to tackle the worst epidemic of haemorrhagic fever-causing virus since its discovery four decades ago.

“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 outbreak is expected to continue for some time. WHO’s operational response plan extends over the next several months,” the organisation warned.

A serious outbreak in Lagos, where the epidemic claimed a fourth victim on Thursday, could severely disrupt the oil and gas industry in Nigeria if international companies are forced to evacuate staff and local operations are shut down, the Moody’s rating agency warned.

Any “decline in production would quickly translate into economic and fiscal deterioration,” said Matt Robinson, senior credit officer at Moody’s.

Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama called President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and Sierra Leone’s leader Ernest Bai Koromo.

The calls came as the US State Department ordered families of its diplomats in Sierra Leone to leave the country to avoid exposure.

In Sierra Leone’s parliament on Thursday, the country’s chief medical officer, Dr Brima Kargbo, spoke of the difficulties health workers were facing in fighting the epidemic.

“We still have to break the chain of transmission to separate the infected from the uninfected,” Kargbo said. But, he added: “There is a rejection among people of the existence of Ebola and hostility towards health workers.”

Sierra Leone disclosed Thursday that 32 nurses died from Ebola while performing their duties between May 24 to August 13.

South Africa has stepped in to help the country by sending a mobile laboratory to be installed in the capital Freetown to ease the problem of having to send blood samples elsewhere for analysis, Sierra Leone’s health ministry said.