ACCRA: Ebola-hit nations met for crisis talks yesterday as the death toll topped 1,500 and the World Health Organisation warned that the number of cases could exceed 20,000 before the outbreak is stemmed.
Nigeria announced that the virus had reached its oil-producing hub, dashing hopes that the country had successfully contained it to its biggest city, Lagos.
Hopes were raised, meanwhile, of a vaccine for the haemorrhagic fever after British medical charity the Wellcome Trust and pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline said safety trials on a new drug could begin as soon as next month.
But Bruce Aylward, the WHO’s head of emergency programmes, said that it could take six to nine months to bring Ebola under control, by which time the number of infections could have passed 20,000.
As of August 26, 1,552 people had been confirmed dead from Ebola in four countries — Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Nigeria — while 3,062 had been infected.
But Aylward warned that the actual caseload could be “two to four times higher than the number of cases you see reported”.
Health ministers from member states of the West African regional bloc ECOWAS met in the Ghanaian capital Accra to discuss how to strengthen its response to the devastating outbreak.
Ghana’s President John Mahama, the current ECOWAS chairman, complained that security measures taken by other countries to prevent the virus spreading, including travel bans, had unfairly hit member states.
“Currently in the sub-region, Ebola is officially reported in four countries and yet the entire West African sub-region of 15 nations and even Africa as a whole of 54 nations has been stigmatised,” he told delegates.
As the meeting began, Nigeria’s health minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said a doctor in the southeastern city of Port Harcourt had become the sixth person to die of Ebola and the first outside Lagos.
The medic died on August 22, a day after treating a patient who had contact with the Liberian-American man who first brought the virus to Nigeria and who died in a Lagos hospital on July 25.
Port Harcourt, 435 kilometres east of Lagos and the capital of Rivers state, is the centre of Nigeria’s oil industry.
A number of airlines, including Air France and British Airways, have suspended their services to Freetown and Monrovia, leading to complaints that Ebola-hit countries were being increasingly isolated. The WHO’s Aylward said it was “absolutely vital” that airlines resume flights because it was hindering the emergency response. A travel ban was “a self-defeating strategy”, he added.
AFP
