Since March, the Ebola outbreak has claimed close to 4,500 lives — the vast majority of them in the west African states of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. And so far, while there have been limited cases in the rest of the world, most of those can be traced back to health care workers who have been fighting the deadly disease in the field.
In part, the geographical area affected by the disease seems to have affected the developed world’s response to Ebola. That can be callously defined as ‘it’s not in their backyard, so they don’t have to worry or act’. The deaths of a health care worker in the US and cases there and in Spain have kicked the US into ordering screening of air travellers at five airports. Canada, the UK and other nations are also beginning similar screening programmes, though whether thermal scans are useful in preventing the spread of the disease is doubtful. Thermal imaging picks up passengers with high temperatures. What it cannot do is determine who has been in contact with the Ebola virus and may still be incubating the virus without running a higher temperature.
Any complacency about Ebola needs to be shelved once and for all, given the dire predictions about the spread of the virus from the World Health Organisation (WHO). Officials in Geneva are warning there could be 10,000 new cases a week within two months. And Dr Bruce Aylward, the WHO assistant director-general, told a news conference in Geneva that the number of new cases was likely to be between 5,000 and 10,000 a week by early December.
Clearly, the key now is to rush more medical aid and provide nursing facilities and specialist assistance to the epicentre of the outbreak. By containing the disease within a geographical area, there is a chance that WHO’s dire prediction will not become a reality. And every effort must be made in developing a vaccine or effective pharmaceutical treatment for Ebola as quickly as possible. The clock is ticking.
