UN: Ebola cases could hit 20K

Associated Press

GENEVA

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is accelerating and could grow six times larger to infect as many as 20,000 people, the World Health Organization said Thursday. The U.N. health agency unveiled a new road map for containing the virus, and scientists are fast-tracking efforts to find a treatment or vaccine.

Ebola has menaced Africa for 40 years but previously struck in remote villages and was contained fairly quickly. This time, it has spread to major cities in four countries, provoking unrest as whole neighborhoods and towns have been sealed to the outside.

An experimental vaccine developed by the U.S. government and GlaxoSmithKline will be tested on humans starting next week, the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced Thursday. The NIH trial will use healthy adult volunteers in Maryland, and British experts simultaneously will test the same vaccine in healthy people in the U.K., Gambia and Mali.

Preliminary results on the vaccine’s safety — not its effectiveness — could be available in months.

Scientists also announced that they have mapped the genetic code of this strain of Ebola to better understand how it kills. In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers traced an explosion of cases in this outbreak to a single funeral in Guinea in May.

They hope to use the genetic mapping to track mutations that could become more worrisome the longer the outbreak lasts, and make a difference in how doctors spot and fight the disease as vaccines are developed.

The outbreak has killed at least 1,552 people among 3,069 reported cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria, and the real caseload in urban areas could be two to four times higher. Meanwhile, an entirely separate Ebola outbreak has killed 13 of 42 people sickened in a remote area of Congo, in Central Africa, the agency said.

With about a 50 percent mortality rate among those known to be infected, the overall death toll could reach 10,000 in the worst-case scenario.

“I think that’s completely unacceptable,” said the agency’s emergency operations director, Dr. Bruce Aylward.

The WHO’s new plan would cost $489 million to support 750 international health workers and 12,000 national ones. It aims to:

Stop Ebola transmission in affected countries within six to nine months;

Prevent the spread of any new infections within eight weeks of a case being identified anywhere in the world;

Improve the public- health responses to Ebola in any nation with major transportation hubs or borders shared with affected countries.

With the world’s support, medical workers hope to take “the heat out of this outbreak” within three months, Aylward said.

The U.N. agency’s announcement was immediately criticized by Doctors Without Borders, a medical charity running many of the treatment centers in West Africa.

“The WHO road map is welcome, but it should not give a false sense of hope. A plan needs to be acted upon. Huge questions remain,” the charity’s operations director, Bruce de le Vingne, said in a statement.