The UN’s health agency said on Thursday that the scale of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has been vastly underestimated and “extraordinary measures” were needed to contain the disease.
As the official toll climbed to 1,069, according to the WHO, the US ordered the evacuation of diplomats’ families from Sierra Leone, one of the three countries at the epicenter of the outbreak, along with Liberia and Guinea.
The Geneva-based WHO said in a statement it was coordinating “a massive scaling up of the international response,” in a bid to tackle the worst epidemic of hemorrhagic fever-causing virus since its discovery four decades ago.
“Staff at the outbreak sites see evidence that the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak,” it said.
“The outbreak is expected to continue for some time. WHO’s operational response plan extends over the next several months,” the organization said.
US President Barack Obama called Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koromo.
The calls came as the US Department of State ordered families of its diplomats in Sierra Leone to leave the country to avoid exposure.
“In his conversations with both leaders, the president underscored the commitment of the United States to work with Liberia, Sierra Leone, and other international partners to contain the outbreak and expressed his condolences for the lives lost,” the White House said in a statement.
In Sierra Leone’s parliament on Thursday, the nation’s chief medical officer, Brima Kargbo, spoke of the difficulties health workers were facing in fighting the epidemic.
“We still have to break the chain of transmission to separate the infected from the uninfected,” Kargbo said.
However, he added: “There is a rejection among people of the existence of Ebola and hostility towards health workers.”
The disease has taken its toll on those trying to help its victims.
Sierra Leone disclosed on Thursday that 32 nurses died from Ebola while performing their duties between May 24 and Aug. 13.
South Africa has stepped in to help the country by sending a mobile laboratory to be installed in the capital, Freetown, to ease the problem of having to send blood samples elsewhere for analysis, Sierra Leone’s health ministry said.
In Liberia, which has suffered more than 300 deaths, work began on Thursday to expand its Ebola treatment center in the capital, Monrovia — one of only two centers in the country of 4.2 million.
“We need to increase the size of this place because more and more people arrive every day due to the awareness programme,” center head Nathaniel Dovillie said.
The cost of tackling the virus threatens to exact a severe economic toll on the already impoverished west African nations at the epicenter of the outbreak, Moody’s ratings agency said. “The outbreak risks having a direct financial effect on government budgets via increased health expenditures that could be significant,” it said.
A serious outbreak in Lagos, where the epidemic claimed a fourth victim on Thursday, could severely disrupt the oil and gas industry in Nigeria if international companies are forced to evacuate staff and local operations are shut down, it said.
Any “decline in production would quickly translate into economic and fiscal deterioration,” said Matt Robinson, a senior credit officer at Moody’s.
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