2,296 people have died from Ebola - WHO

The death toll from the worst Ebola outbreak in history has risen to no fewer than 2,296 and is likely to be higher than that, the World Health Organisation(WHO) said yesterday.

The WHO said it had recorded 4,293 cases in five West African countries as of Sept. 6, a day after its previous update. But it still did not have new figures for Liberia, the worst-affected country, suggesting the true toll is already much higher.

The WHO has said it expects thousands of new cases in Liberia in the next three weeks.

As well as struggling to contain the disease, the organisation is having difficulty compiling data on the number of cases, said Sylvie Briand, the director of WHO’s department of pandemic and epidemic diseases.

“We know that the numbers are under-estimated. We are currently working to estimate the under-estimation,” Briand told a news briefing in Geneva.

Meanwhile, Nigerian woman resident in Italy was hospitalised yesterday with symptoms that have led doctors to fear she may be the country’s first case of someone contracting the Ebola virus.

The outbreak began last December and has been gathering pace for months, but about 60 percent of Liberia’s cases and deaths occurred within the last three weeks, the data showed.

Source: Leadership

The deadliest Ebola epidemic on record has now infected more than 5,000 people in west Africa and killed around half of them, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

The UN health agency said a total of 5,347 people had been infected across five west African countries, and that 2,630 had died.

In the three hardest-hit countries of Guinea, Libera and Sierra Leone, 45 percent of the cases were recorded in the past three weeks, WHO said.

Here are the latest WHO numbers, as of September 14:
In Guinea, where the outbreak began at the start of the year, Ebola had claimed 601 lives, or 64 percent of the 942 people infected.

Thirty-three per cent of those cases surfaced in the 21 days leading up to September 14.

In Liberia, which has been hit hardest by the outbreak, 1,459 people had died from Ebola, representing 54 percent of the 2,710 people infected.

A full 52 percent, or 1,383, of those cases were recorded during the three weeks before September 14.

In Sierra Leone, 562 people had died from Ebola, accounting for 34 per cent of the 1,673 people infected.

Thirty-nine percent of those cases were recorded during the preceding 21 days.

Nigeria had, as of September 14, seen eight Ebola deaths since the virus first arrived in the country with a Liberian finance ministry official who died in Lagos on July 25.

That amounts to 38 per cent of the 21 cases. Six of those cases have emerged in the past three weeks.

Senegal’s only confirmed Ebola case — a Guinean student who crossed the border just before it was closed on August 21 — has recovered, but the country will not be declared transmission-free before 42 days have passed since the case was recorded.

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