Mr Banbury issued a stern warning on Tuesday - telling the UN Security Council by video-link from West Africa that if Ebola was not stopped now, the world would "face an entirely unprecedented situation for which we do not have a plan
"If we do not get ahead of the crisis, if we do not reach our targets and the number of people with Ebola rises dramatically as some have predicted, the plan we have is not scalable to the size of such a new crisis," he said.
He called for more money to build treatment centres and more medical personnel to staff them.
It follows the WHO's latest projections suggesting the infection rate could reach 5,000 to 10,000 new cases a week within two months if global efforts to combat the spread of infection were not stepped up.
There have been 8,914 cases overall, including the fatal cases, and the WHO says it expects this number to top 9,000 by the end of the week.
Out of media player. Press enter toThe progress towards an Ebola vaccine - in 80 secoThe WHO estimates its figures by taking the numbers of
confirmed cases and multiplying them from Guinea by 1.5, from Sierra
Leone by 2 and from Liberia by 2.5 - to account for under-reporting.WHO assistant director-general Bruce Aylward said on Tuesday
that the rate of infections appeared to be slowing in the historic
epicentre of the outbreak, but warned that it was too early to read
this as success.
It comes after the head of the US Centers for Disease Control, Thomas Frieden, said there had been a breach of protocol by health workers that led to the nurse becoming infected.
"The CDC is saying that protocols were breached, but the nurses are saying there were no protocols," the head of the national nurses union, Roseann DeMoro, told reporters.
0 comments:
Post a Comment