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 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.
Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said on Tuesday she expects
the Ebola crisis gripping her country to worsen in the coming weeks
as health workers struggle with inadequate supplies, a lack of
outside support and a population in fear.
"It remains a very grave situation," she told an audience at Harvard
University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, via Skype from Liberia's
capital Monrovia. "It is taking a long time to respond effectively
.... We expect it to accelerate for at least another two or three
weeks before we can look forward to a decline."
Liberia's defense minister told the United Nations Security Council
that Ebola posed a mortal threat to the country.
"Liberia is facing a serious threat to its national existence. The
deadly Ebola virus has caused a disruption of the normal functioning
of our State," said Liberian Minister of National Defense Brownie
Samukai.
As well as struggling to contain the disease, the U.N. health
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," Briand told a news
briefing in Geneva. "We are currently working to estimate the
under-estimation.
"It's a war against this virus. It's a very difficult war. What we
try now is to win some battles at least in some places."
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.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said that Liberia's Montserrado
County, which includes the capital, Monrovia, needs 1,000 beds to
treat Ebola patients but the medical charity can only provide around
400 of those.
"We know that every day there are more people that need to be taken
care of than we can include in our program. At the moment, there are
insufficient beds," MSF emergency coordinator Laurence Sailly told a
news conference on Tuesday.
BIO HAZARD SUIT
Sailly said MSF was lobbying other non-governmental organizations
and the United Nations to increase their response in the three
countries, particularly in Liberia.
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"We are working also in Guinea and Sierra Leone, so we will not be
able to have more than 300 to 400 beds here in Montserrado. We are
not going to go more than that, and it is not going to do anything
with the scale of the epidemic here," Sailly said.
An American doctor infected with Ebola in Sierra Leone arrived at
Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, the fourth patient with the
virus to be taken to the United States from West Africa for
treatment, the hospital said.
The doctor, who has not been identified, wore a full-body biohazard
suit as he walked gingerly into the hospital where two other
Americans were successfully treated, television images showed.
Some 33 people are being kept in quarantine in a run-down house in
the Senegalese capital Dakar after a student from neighboring Guinea
arrived in the city two weeks ago bringing Ebola.
The student is now in isolation in a Dakar hospital, his condition
improving, according to the health ministry.
In Guinea and Sierra Leone, the other two countries at the center of
the outbreak, only 39 percent of cases and around 29 percent of
deaths have occurred in the past three weeks, suggesting they are
doing better at tackling the outbreak.
The new figures also showed two new suspected cases in Senegal in
addition to one previously confirmed case there. In Nigeria, the
overall number of cases fell to 21 from 22, as at least one
suspected case turned out not to be Ebola.
(Additional reporting by James Harding Giahyue in Monrovia, Emma
Farge and Andrew Oberstadt in Dakar, Colleen Jenkins in the United
States, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Michelle Nichols at the
United Nations; Writing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg; Editing by Ken Wills)
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