WHO: Ebola spreading in W. Africa, threatens Ivory Coast; some areas see fewer cases

THE WASHINGTON POST
By Joel Achenbach                                                  October 14 at 9:15 AM

The World Health Organization issued a mixed report Tuesday on progress in the fight against the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, noting that the number of new cases is dropping in some areas that had been hit hard by the virus earlier this year. But the disease is spreading across a broader geographical region, including along the Ivory Coast border, and continues to be rampant in some capital cities.

Ebola is killing 70 percent of the people who become infected, said Bruce Aylward, WHO assistant director-general overseeing the organization’s response to the West Africa epidemic. In a conference call with journalists, he said the official statistics do not capture the true lethality of the virus.

“We have had to carefully identify those individual patients for whom we could follow their entire course – when we do that carefully, we find that 70% are dying and that this number is pretty robust across the 3 worst-affected countries,” Aylward said in an e-mail to The Washington Post.

At current rates, there will likely be 5,000 to 10,000 new cases a week in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea by Dec. 1, Aylward said in the conference call. To stop the outbreak, the WHO is pushing a plan to make sure that 70 percent of burials are safe and that 70 percent of sick patients are in treatment by then.

“That’s a real stretch target,” he said.

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