The Ebola outbreak in West Africa eventually could exceed 20,000 cases, more than six times as many as are now known, the World Health Organization said Thursday.
A new plan by the UN health agency to stop Ebola also assumes that the actual number of cases in many hard-hit areas may be two to four times higher than currently reported. If that's accurate, it suggests there could be up to 12,000 cases already.
The agency published new figures saying that 1,552 people have died from the killer virus from among the 3,069 cases reported so far in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria. At least 40 per cent of the cases have been in just the last three weeks, the UN health agency said, adding that "the outbreak continues to accelerate."
'That's not saying we expect 20,000, but we have got to have a system in place that we can deal with robust numbers.'- Dr. Bruce Aylward, WHO
In Geneva, the agency also released a new plan for handling the Ebola crisis that aims to stop Ebola transmission in affected countries within six to nine months and prevent it from spreading internationally.
Dr. Bruce Aylward, WHO's assistant director-general, told reporters the plan would cost $489 million US over the next nine months and require the assistance of 750 international workers and 12,000 national workers.
The 20,000 figure, he added, "is a scale that I think has not ever been anticipated in terms of an Ebola outbreak."
"That's not saying we expect 20,000," he added. "But we have got to have a system in place that we can deal with robust numbers."
Aylward said the far-higher caseload is believed to come from cities.
"It's really just some urban areas that have outstripped the reporting capacity," he said.
Aylward also said the agency is urging airlines to lift most of their restrictions about flying to Ebola-hit nations because a predictable "air link" is needed to help deal with the crisis. Air France on Wednesday cancelled its flights to Sierra Leone. Aylward said the agency hopes airlines will lift most restrictions within two weeks.
Evaded surveillance
Nigerian authorities, meanwhile, said a man who contracted Ebola after coming into contact with a traveller from Liberia had evaded their surveillance efforts and infected a doctor in southern Nigeria who later died.
The announcement of a sixth death in Nigeria marked the first fatality outside the commercial capital of Lagos, where a Liberian-American man Patrick Sawyer arrived in late July and later died of Ebola. On Wednesday, Nigerian authorities had said they not yet eliminated the disease from Africa's most populous nation but that it was being contained.
The doctor's wife is also in isolation now after she starting showing symptoms of Ebola, Nigerian Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu added. Morticians who embalmed the doctor are part of a group of 70 people now under surveillance in Port Harcourt.
In contrast, doctors say three Canadian scientists being evacuated out of Sierra Leone likely won't spend time in a hospital containment unit. Health Canada says the researchers are not ill or experiencing any symptoms.
The scientists are returning home because three people in the hotel where they were staying have become infected with Ebola, Health Canada said. They are under voluntary isolation as a precaution. As an added precaution, they will not be travelling on a commercial flight to Canada, the department said Wednesday.
Canadian hospitals prepare
If Canadian aid workers become infected with the Ebola virus while working in Africa, the only facility where they can go for treatment is a six-room isolation pod at Toronto Western Hospital.
"The reason we built this was because we thought, 'Hey, we would have loved something like this during SARS, so why don't we prepare for the next big infectious diseases emergency and actually design part of our ICU to be able to care for that?' So we built exactly what we need," said Dr. Michael Gardam, director of infection prevention and control at University Health Network, which includes Toronto Western.
Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre is also preparing its isolation ward for possible Ebola patients who may show up from the general public or from the city's National Microbiology Laboratory, where staff conduct research on pathogens including the Ebola virus.
In other news, in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health announced Thursday it is launching the safety trial on a vaccine developed by the agency's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and GlaxoSmithKline. It will test 20 healthy adult volunteers to see if the virus is safe and triggers an adequate response in their immune systems.
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