With the death toll surging past 1,900, the current Ebola outbreak has killed more than all previous outbreaks combined. Health officials warned that the increasing number of cases indicates that the outbreak is “spiraling out of control.”
Guinea’s government said on Wednesday that Ebola had spread to a previously unaffected region of the country, as U.S. experts warned that the worst ever outbreak of the deadly virus was spiraling out of control in West Africa. The news came on the same day that the outbreak hit another grim milestone: With a death toll that just surpassed 1,900, the current outbreak has now killed more people than all previous outbreaks combined.
Guinea, the first country to detect the hemorrhagic fever in March, had said it was containing the outbreak but authorities announced Wednesday that nine new cases had been discovered in the southeastern prefecture of Kerouane.
The area, some 750 km (470 miles) southeast of the capital Conakry, lies close to where the virus was first detected deep in Guinea’s forest region. The epidemic has since spread to four other West African countries.
“There has been a new outbreak in Kerouane but we have sent in a team to contain it,” said Aboubacar Sikidi Diakité, head of Guinea’s Ebola task force. He insisted the outbreak was being contained.
The nine confirmed cases were in the town of Damaro in the Kerouane region, with a total of 18 people under observation, the health ministry said in a statement. This particular outbreak started after the arrival of an infected person from neighboring Liberia, officials said.
President Alpha Conde urged health personnel to step up their efforts to avoid new infections. “Even for a simple malaria, you have to protect yourselves before consulting any sick person until the end of this epidemic,” Conde said in a televised broadcast. “We had started to succeed but you dropped the ball and here we go again.”
Ebola is a zoonotic infection — meaning that it jumps from an animal host into the human population — that is transmitted from human-to-human through direct contact with the blood or other bodily fluids of sick people. The unexpected appearance of the virus in countries that have never seen it before, and which have weak health systems, contributed to the worsening of the epidemic, health officials say.
In the past 7 months cases of Ebola have been reported in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal and Democratic Republic of Congo. However, the cases in DRC, which include 31 deaths, are a separate outbreak unrelated to the West African cases, the World Health Organization has said
Since the virus surfaced in Guinea in December, more than 3,500 people have been infected, the WHO reports. In the 24 earlier Ebola outbreaks, including the first recorded one in 1976, 1,590 people died, statistics from the Geneva-based agency show.
Outbreak is ‘not under control anywhere’
In a stark situation assessment last week, the WHO warned that the Ebola epidemic in West Africa could infect more than 20,000 people and spread to at least 10 countries. The agency also outlined a $490 million roadmap for tackling the epidemic.
Meanwhile, infectious disease specialist and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim called the international response “disastrously inadequate” and said that people are dying needlessly from the disease due to a lack of basic medical supplies and protective equipment.
Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Centre for Global Health, said on Wednesday the outbreak was “spiraling out of control” and warned that the window of opportunity for controlling it was closing. “Guinea did show that with action, they brought it partially under control. But unfortunately it is back on the increase now,” he said. “It’s not under control anywhere.”
He warned that the longer the outbreak went uncontained, the greater the possibility the virus could mutate, making it more difficult to contain. A recent genetic analysis of the Ebola strain behind the current outbreak found that the virus has acquired more than 300 unique mutations that differentiate it from previous strains.
A senior U.S. official rebutted a call from medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) (Doctors Without Borders) for wealthy nations to deploy specialized biological disaster response teams to the region. MSF on Tuesday had warned that 800 more beds for Ebola patients were urgently needed in the Liberian capital Monrovia alone.
“I don’t think at this point deploying biological incident response teams is exactly what’s needed,” said Gayle Smith, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Development and Democracy on the National Security Council. She said the U.S. government was focusing efforts on rapidly increasing the number of Ebola treatment centers in affected countries, providing protective equipment and ensuring local staff received training.
“We will see a considerable ramp-up in the coming days and weeks. If we find it is still moving out of control we will look at other options,” Smith added.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said on Tuesday a federal contract worth up to $42.3 million would help accelerate testing of an experimental Ebola virus treatment being developed by privately held Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc. Additionally, human safety trials are due to begin this week on a vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline Plc and later this year on one from NewLink Genetics Corp.
Last week, researchers published the results of the first animal trials of the experimental drug ZMapp, which has already been administered to several Ebola patients during the outbreak. The drug showed promising potential in animals: All of the infected monkeys who received the drug within five days of infection were alive at the end of the trial.