This appears to be a reliable understanding of the actual risk of the
Ebola threat. It can be isolated and suppressed and with this
present outbreak it seems reasonable that the problem may be also
resolved more permanently.
Any disease that kills over ninety percent of its victims soon runs
out of victims if only by the expedient of most potential victims
actually running.
Once quarantined, it dies out in short order. In the meantime we are
been treated to no end of panic mongering.
Exclusive:
Liberia’s president rejects new Ebola predictions as ‘wrong’
2014-10-01
In an exclusive
interview with FRANCE 24, Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
on Wednesday blasted the US health agency and the World Health
Organization (WHO) for their latest estimates on the expected number
of new Ebola cases.
The Liberian leader
said that an estimate released by the US Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) last week was flat-out wrong.
The agency has warned
that the number of Ebola cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone could
explode to a staggering 1.4 million in January unless efforts are
ramped up.
“Absolutely not!”
Sirleaf told FRANCE 24’s Marc Perelman of the figures, adding that
“even the WHO‘s initial projections that some 20,000 would
likely die in the affected countries by January, even that is not
going to happen.”
The WHO warned last
week that there is a possibility that west Africa could see tens of
thousands of new Ebola cases in the coming months.
“I am waiting for
the next projections and I hope they will admit that they’ve just
been simply wrong, that all of our countries are getting
this thing under control,” she said, referring also to
Guinea which is among the nations in West Africa that have been the
hardest hit by the deadly virus.
SIRLEAF: 'WE SEE A
STABILISATION'
Ebola has so far
infected 7, 178 people and killed more than 3,300, roughly
half of whom have been in Liberia.
The WHO, which
released the new figures on Wednesday, said that the total number of
new cases had fallen for the second week in a row, but warned they
were likely to be under-reported.
‘On the road to
solving this’
In the interview,
Sirleaf said that the outbreak is actually showing signs of
stabilising.
“We are beginning to
see a stabilisation… even in Monrovia which has been hit the
hardest,” she said of Liberia’s capital, which is home to more
than a third of the country’s population.
Sirleaf said there has
been a marked slow-down in the number of people reporting to
treatment centres, noting that this is a telling sign “that we are
finally on the road to solving this”.
The outbreak, which
started about six months ago, has overwhelmed the health systems in
the affected African countries and left aid groups scrambling for
resources.
The US, the EU and
other nations have sent money, supplies and personnel to try to stop
the virus from spreading further.
Sirleaf hailed the
international response, even though it took a while before it got off
the ground, she said.
“(Ebola) has never
been part of our health concern. It took us a while to know it and it
took the international community a while to recognise what it was,”
she said.
“Initially, nobody
thought about Ebola” when the first cases appeared, she said.
1 comment:
Lets hope that the lady is correct. In the meantime, Obama should use the authority granted by Congress to stop all flights from the infected nations.
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