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WHO: Ebola cases on the rise

October 14, 2014

The World Health Organization says the Ebola virus is still spreading in West Africa. The WHO also warned the number of cases will pass 9,000 this week.

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Bruce Aylward
Image: Reuters/D. Balibouse

West Africa could see up to 10,000 new Ebola cases a week within two months, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.

The UN health agency said the Ebola epidemic was still spreading in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia and warned the number of cases will exceed 9,000 this week.

Assistant Director General Bruce Aylward told a press conference at the WHO headquarters in Geneva that the death toll had passed 4,400 from a total of more than 8,900 cases since the outbreak started in Guinea in March.

Even though there were signs that rates of infection were slowing in some of the worst-hit areas, it would be "really, really premature" to read success into the operation to stop the spread of the disease, he continued.

Aylward also emphasized while some regions had seen the number of Ebola cases stabilize or fall, it "doesn't mean they will get down to zero."

Elsewhere, international aid organization Doctors Without Borders said on Tuesday that 16 of its staff members had been infected with Ebola and nine of them had died.

Ebola cases under-reported

In recent months, the WHO had warned that Ebola cases were under-reported in the three hardest-hit West African states, and that an understanding of the scale and pace of the outbreak was crucial to stopping it.

Aylward also said the published data could be misleading because the number of known deaths was less than half the number of cases.

The Ebola mortality rate was around 70 percent, a figure that was consistent across Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, he said.

Germany's first Ebola death

A UN medical worker infected with Ebola in Liberia died in Germany on Tuesday despite intensive medical procedures.

Ebola patient died at St. Georg Hospital in Leipzig on Tuesday
An Ebola patient died at St. Georg Hospital in Leipzig on TuesdayImage: picture-alliance/dpa/Hendrik Schmidt

The St. Georg Hospital in Leipzig said the 56-year-old man, whose name had not been released, died overnight.

He arrived in Leipzig for treatment on October 9, and the hospital's chief executive, Dr. Iris Minde, said there was no risk of other people being infected as he had been in a secure isolation ward.

The man was the third Ebola patient to be flown to Germany for treatment - the first man recovered and returned home to Senegal, and an aid worker from Uganda was still being treated in Frankfurt.

lw/sb (dpa, AP, Reuters, AFP)