Ebola getting ‘out of control’

Outbreak hitting Africa is worst yet

June 2014 – AFRICA, Senegal — The Ebola outbreak ravaging West Africa is ‘‘totally out of control,’’ said a senior official for Doctors Without Borders, who says the medical group is stretched to the limit in its capacity to respond. The current outbreak has caused more deaths than any other on record, another official with the medical charity said. Ebola has been linked to more than 330 deaths in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, according to the latest numbers from the World Health Organization. International organizations and the governments involved need to send in more health experts and increase public education messages about how to stop the spread of the disease, Bart Janssens, the director of operations for the group in Brussels, told the Associated Press on Friday. ‘‘The reality is clear that the epidemic is now in a second wave,’’ Janssens said. ‘‘And, for me, it is totally out of control.’’ The outbreak, which began in Guinea either late last year or early this year, had appeared to slow before picking up pace again in recent weeks, including spreading to the Liberian capital for the first time. ‘‘This is the highest outbreak on record and has the highest number of deaths, so this is unprecedented so far,’’ said Armand Sprecher, a public health specialist with Doctors Without Borders. According to a World Health Organization list, the highest previous death toll was in the first recorded Ebola outbreak in Congo in 1976, when 280 deaths were reported. Because Ebola often touches remote areas and the first cases sometimes go unrecognized, it is likely that there are deaths that go uncounted, both in this outbreak and previous ones. 

The multiple locations of the current outbreak and its movement across borders make it one of the ‘‘most challenging Ebola outbreaks ever,’’ Fadela Chaib, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization, said earlier in the week. The outbreak shows no sign of abating, and governments and international organizations were ‘‘far from winning this battle,’’ Unni Krishnan, head of disaster preparedness and response for Plan International, said Friday. But Janssens’ description of the Ebola outbreak was even more alarming, and he warned that the governments affected had not recognized the gravity of the situation. He criticized the World Health Organization for not doing enough to prod leaders and said that it needs to bring in more experts to do the vital work of tracing all of the people who have been in contact with the sick. ‘‘There needs to be a real political commitment that this is a very big emergency,’’ he said. ‘‘Otherwise, it will continue to spread, and for sure it will spread to more countries.’’ –Boston Globe