Ebola is threatening the very existence of Liberia as the virus spreads like “wildfire,” the defense minister warned on Tuesday, following a grim WHO assessment that the worst is yet to come.
After predicting an “exponential increase” in infections across West Africa, the WHO warned that Liberia, which has accounted for half of all fatalities, could initially only hope to slow the contagion, not stop it.
“Liberia is facing a serious threat to its national existence,” Liberian Defense Minister Brownie Samukai told a meeting of the UN Security Council on Tuesday.
The disease is “now spreading like wildfire, devouring everything in its path,” he said.
The WHO raised the Ebola death toll on Tuesday to 2,296 out of 4,293 cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria as of Saturday last week. Nearly half of all infections had occurred in the past 21 days, it said.
The latest WHO figures underscore Ebola’s asymmetric spread, as it rips through densely populated communities with decrepit health facilities and poor public awareness campaigns.
Speaking on Tuesday, WHO’s epidemiology chief Sylvie Briand said the goal in Senegal and Nigeria was now “to stop transmission completely.”
Senegal has announced only one infection, while Nigeria has recorded 19 infections and eight deaths.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is battling a separate outbreak which has killed 32 in a remote northwestern region.
“But in other locations, like Monrovia, where we have really wide community transmission, we are aiming at two-step strategies,” Briand said in Geneva. “First, to reduce the transmission as much as possible and, when it becomes controllable, we will also try to stop it completely. “But at this point in time we need to be pragmatic and try to reduce it in the initial steps.”
A day earlier the WHO had warned that aid organizations trying to help Liberia to respond would “need to prepare to scale up their current efforts by three- to four-fold.”
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