WHO says W.Africa Ebola outbreak still expanding geographically

The number of Ebola cases in a vast outbreak in West Africa will go over 9,000 this week and the epidemic is still expanding geographically in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday.       

The death toll so far in the outbreak, first reported in Guinea in March, has reached 4,447 from a total of 8,914 cases, said WHO assistant director general Bruce Aylward.      

While there are signs of rates of infection slowing in some of the worst-hit areas, Aylward said the disease has now reached "more districts, counties and prefectures" than it had a month ago, and said case numbers would continue to rise.          

"We will go over 9,000 cases this week," he told reporters from the WHO's Geneva headquarters. "In certain areas were seeing disease coming down but that doesn't mean they're going to go to zero."         

He stressed it would be "really, really premature" to read any success into the apparent slowing numbers in some areas.

In the same regard, a battalion of 800 Sierra Leone soldiers awaiting deployment as peacekeepers in Somalia has been placed in quarantine after one of its members tested positive for the deadly Ebola virus, military officials said on Tuesday.       

The soldiers were due to relieve the West African nation's contingent already deployed with Somalia's African Union peacekeeping mission, known as AMISOM.       

However, they will now be subject to a 21-day isolation period, a senior officer in Sierra Leone's army told Reuters, asking not to be named.       

Colonel Michael Samoura, spokesman of the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces, confirmed that a member of the battalion had tested positive for the disease.           

He said the soldier was infected after leaving without permission the military camp where the force is based.        

More than 4,000 people have died in the worst epidemic of the viral haemorrhagic fever on record, most of them in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.          

Cases of the disease have also been recorded in Nigeria, Senegal, Spain and the United States, but outbreaks in those countries have been contained so far.

Also on Tuesday, a U.N. medical official who caught Ebola while working in Liberia has died in the German hospital where he was being treated, the clinic in Leipzig said.

"The patient sick with Ebola fever died during the night in St. Georg Clinic in Leipzig. Despite intensive medical measures and maximum efforts by the medical team, the 56-year-old U.N. employee succumbed to the serious infectious disease," it said.

The medic, who has not been named, arrived last week and was the third Ebola patient to be treated in Germany.  


REUTERS