News Digest

Ebola appears to be slowing in Liberia: WHO

Liberia, the country worst-hit by the Ebola epidemic, may be seeing a decline in the spread of the virus, although the battle to contain the outbreak is far from won, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday. WHO Assistant Director General Bruce Aylward told a news conference the number of burials and new admissions had fallen and there was a plateau in laboratory-confirmed cases. Aylward said there had been 13,703 Ebola cases in eight countries and the reported death toll, to be published later on Wednesday, was likely to be over 5,000.

It’s like saying your pet tiger is under control. This is a very, very dangerous disease … A couple of burials go wrong, it can start a whole new set of transmission chains and the disease starts trending upward again.

WHO Assistant Director General Bruce Aylward

A jump of more than 3,000 in the number of cases reported since Saturday was largely due to the data being updated with old cases rather than new cases, he added. Both Senegal and Nigeria have been declared Ebola-free, after passing two incubation periods of a total of 42 days. Cases have also been confirmed in Spain and the United States. But if current trends continued, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone should be able to “comfortably” meet a target to scale up Ebola-containment measures by Dec. 1, he said. Last week, Mali became the sixth West African country to report a case of the disease.