The World Health Organization says the world’s largest historical outbreak of Ebola is likely to grow significantly bigger.
The WHO announced a $490 million dollar program to attempt to contain the virus and quell the outbreak. Doctors said it would take nine months at a minimum to get the outbreak under control and that 20,000 people could be confirmed to have contracted the virus by that point.
However, the WHO doctors admitted the likely amount of patients already infected is two to four times as high as the 3,069 officially listed cases because of patients that contracted the disease and died in rural villages.
The fatality rate of 52 percent, which has resulted in 1,552 deaths as of August 26th, has brought the total almost as high as all previously recorded outbreaks of the virus since its discovery in 1976.
British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline has announced an experimental Ebola vaccine is being pushed into human studies in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health. If the results are good, they plan to send 10,000 doses immediately to infected countries.
The two American aid workers who had contracted the Ebola virus have been released from Emory University Hospital in Atlanta and declared to be virus free.
Dr. Kent Brantly was released Thursday and spoke at a press conference where it was revealed that Nancy Writebol had been released secretly on Tuesday.
In his statement to reporters, Dr. Brantly repeatedly stated the reason that he knows he is alive.
“God saved my life,” Dr. Brantly said.
He shared the moments he realized that something was wrong.
“On Wednesday, July 23, I woke up feeling under the weather and then my life took an unexpected turn as I was diagnosed with Ebola. As I lay in my bed in Liberia for nine days, getting sicker each day, I prayed God would help be more faithful in even in my illness, and that in my illness or even death he would glorified,” Brantly said.
Brantly ended his statement to the press by asking everyone to continue praying for the victims in West Africa and to contact our leaders to get them involved in the fight to stop the spread of the virus.
Albanian officials are downplaying the fact that five of 40 illegal immigrants caught sneaking into the country on Thursday are showing signs of being infected with Ebola.
Officials say that the immigrants arrived from Eritrea by sneaking into Europe through Greece. The immigrants have been taken into quarantine at a hospital about 85 miles from Italy’s closest port.
The revelation of the possible infections comes hours after finding out that one person in Montenegro has been forced into quarantine with symptoms of Ebola. The person reportedly had entered legally into Montenegro from a West African nation.
European nations are starting to announce steps to protect their countries from Ebola. Serbia has announced 21-day medical surveillance for anyone who enters the country from Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea or Nigeria.
Guinea has declared a nationwide public health emergency because of the current outbreak. Liberia announced they have obtained doses of the experimental Ebola drug ZMapp and have started giving it to victims.
The World Health Organization’s assurances that the Ebola virus would not spread from an American man who contracted the disease and then flew to Nigeria where he died has been shown to be false.
Nigerian health officials confirmed Monday that one of the doctors who was treating Patrick Sawyer as he died is now infected with the deadly virus.
Nigerian officials now say they’re doing all they can to track down health workers who had contact with Sawyer and also those who flew with him on the flight to Lagos, Nigeria. Lagos is Nigeria’s most populous city.
Nigerian Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu revealed that three other people have been showing signs of Ebola and are currently awaiting test results.
Authorities in Liberia ordered Monday for all the bodies of Ebola victims to be cremated in an attempt to stop the virus from spreading to family members at funerals or during transport to burial sites.
Doctors Without Borders says this is the first time Ebola has been able to entrench itself in major African cities.
The World Health Organization is warning the deadly Ebola virus has spiraled out of control in West Africa and could be a threat to other nations.
WHO Head Margaret Chan said the epidemic is moving faster than the ability of international groups to be able to control it. She said the response to the virus has been “woefully inadequate.”
‘If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences can be catastrophic in terms of lost lives but also severe socio-economic disruption and a high risk of spread to other countries,” Dr. Chan said. ‘It is taking place in areas with fluid population movements over porous borders, and it has demonstrated its ability to spread via air travel, contrary to what has been seen in past outbreaks. Cases are occurring in rural areas, which are difficult to access, but also in densely populated capital cities. This meeting must mark a turning point in the outbreak response.”
The outbreak how has over 1,200 confirmed cases and over 720 deaths.
African countries that have airlines flying into those cities are now either cancelling flights or conducting all passengers to health screenings before boarding flights. The appearance of an infected person in Nigeria who had been in the region is being cited as cause for alarm.
The top doctor in Sierra Leone leading the fight against Ebola has died less than a week after contracting the virus. The death of Sheik Umar Khan comes less than a week after the death of the top doctor fighting the virus in Liberia.
“It is a big and irreparable loss to Sierra Leone as he was the only specialist the country had in viral hemorrhagic fevers,” said Sierra Leone’s chief medical officer, Brima Kargbo.
The 39-year-old Khan is being called a “national hero” by the government for his refusal to avoid being on the front lines to help victims of the virus. Khan died just hours before the President of the country was arriving to check on his condition.
The Ebola outbreak has now officially killed 672 people in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone but local officials say the toll is much higher because of families that are not bringing their sick relatives to medical facilities. The isolation of the family members is being seen as oppressive by many of the more rural residents of those countries.
Guinea has reported that a new cluster of cases has developed in a mining town in the eastern part of the country and a new isolation ward had to be set up in Siguiri to handle the patients.
Also, some airlines have stopped flights into the countries after an American man who was in Liberia died in Nigeria from the virus after flying after being infected by his sister.
One of the top doctors in Liberia who had treated hundreds of patients of Ebola has died from the disease.
Dr. Samuel Brisbane died Sunday according to a release from government officials. Dr. Brisbane is the first native Liberian doctor to die from the outbreak; a Ugandan doctor who came to assist died earlier this month.
Dr. Brisbane was the medical advisor to former Liberian President Charles Taylor and had worked at the country’s largest hospital, John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Monrovia.
Local officials say that Dr. Brisbane was buried outside the city in an area only known to his family. Another doctor who worked with Dr. Brisbane has also been confirmed to have the virus and is undergoing treatment.
The death comes as other leading doctors in the region are fighting infections. Sierra Leone’s top doctor, Sheik Umar Khan, showed signs of the disease last week and is in treatment. 33-year-old American doctor Kent Brantly is reportedly in grave condition and fighting for his life.
European medical officials have wanted to transfer Dr. Brantly to Europe for treatment but African officials have denied the right to transfer the doctor through their airspace.
A doctor with the Christian humanitarian organization Samaritan’s Purse has been confirmed as a victim of the Ebola virus.
Dr. Kent Branley has been heading up one of the relief and treatment centers hosted by Samaritan’s Purse since last October. He had been in Liberia with his wife and children, who have since been evacuated to the United States.
“Samaritan’s Purse is committed to doing everything possible to help Dr. Brantley during this time of crisis,” the organization said in a statement. “We ask everyone to please pray for him and his family.”
The group has been working with the Centers for Disease Control, Doctors Without Borders, the World Health Organization and Liberia’s Ministry of Health to control the outbreak that has infected almost 1,100 people and killed 660.
A second American doctor, Nancy Writebol, is suspected to have contracted the disease as well and is undergoing confirmatory testing.
The World Health Organization announced the record death toll from the West Africa Ebola outbreak has topped 660 with the total number of cases passing 1,000.
“This is a trend, an overall picture. It’s hard to get an exact picture on the scale of the situation at the moment,” WHO spokesman Paul Garwood told reporters. “We’re providing additional support to hospitals and clinics, and we’re seeing that many of these facilities simply don’t have enough people to provide the constant level of care needed.”
The outbreak of the virus began in Guinea but now Sierra Leone has taken over as the most number of infected residents. While Guinea still has the most deaths with 314 in 415 cases, Sierra Leone is quickly gaining at 219 deaths in 454 cases.
The battle against the disease also took a blow when the top doctor in Sierra Leone dealing with the virus became infected.
Sheik Umar Khan, 39, has treated more than 100 victims of the virus. He had previously spoken of his worries about contracting the virus from working with so many patients. Khan, considered one of Sierra Leone’s few experts on the disease, was rushed to a Doctors Without Borders facility for immediate treatment.
The containment of the disease is also threatened after the family of a victim forcibly removed from her quarantine. Police and military officials are searching for her because she is loose in Freetown, a city of one million residents.
The Food and Drug Administration said that a federal employee who found six vials of the deadly smallpox virus in a cardboard box in a storage room at a Maryland lab also found hundreds of vials of other diseases.
The samples included influenza, rickettsia (which can cause the lethal Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever) and dengue.
FDA official said Wednesday the collection of 327 vials of the various diseases was found at the same time as the smallpox virus vials announced last week.
Testing at the CDC discovered the smallpox viruses in the vial were alive and infectious.
“The fact that these materials were not discovered until now is unacceptable,” said Karen Midthun, of FDA’s director for biologics. “However, upon finding these materials our staff did the right thing – they immediately notified the appropriate authorities who secured the materials and determined there was no exposure.”
The FDA said 32 vials of tissue samples and non-contagious virus were destroyed at the laboratory and the remaining 279 samples were sent to the Department of Homeland Security for storage.