We're Losing The Fight Against Ebola

Health workers in Liberia. (Screen capture from YouTube video)

By Tom Miles and Kate Kelland
The number of new Ebola cases in West Africa is growing faster than authorities can manage them, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday, renewing a call for health workers from around the world to go to the region to help.

As the death toll rose to more than 2,400 people out of 4,784 cases, WHO director general Margaret Chan said the vast nature of the outbreak -- particularly in the three hardest-hit countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone -- required a massive emergency response.

"The Ebola outbreak that is ravaging parts of West Africa is the largest and most complex and most severe in the almost four-decade history of this disease," she told reporters on an international teleconference from Geneva.

"The number of new patients is moving far faster than the capacity to manage them. We need to surge at least three to four times to catch up with the outbreaks."

Chan called for urgent international support in sending doctors, nurses, medical supplies and aid to the worst-affected countries.

"The thing we need most is people," she said. "The right people, the right specialists, and specialists who are appropriately trained and know how to keep themselves safe."

The Ebola infection rate and death toll have been particularly high among health workers, who are exposed to hundreds of highly infectious patients who can pass the virus on through body fluids such as blood and excrement.

Some foreign healthcare workers, including several Americans and at least one Briton, have also become infected while working with patients in West Africa.

Speaking at the same briefing, Cuba's minister for public health, Roberto Morales Ojeda, said his country would be sending 165 healthcare workers to help in the fight - the largest contingent of foreign doctors and nurses to be committed so far.

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