Big News Network.com Saturday 18th October, 2014
WASHINGTON/FREETOWN With the number of cases of Ebola diagnosed in the United States having spread to three people on Saturday, US President Barack Obama sought to reassure the public, urging them against giving in to "mass hysteria", while the president of Sierra Leone has put the army in charge of containment of the outbreak.
"What we're seeing now is not an 'outbreak' or an 'epidemic' of Ebola in America," said Obama. "This is a serious disease, but we can't give in to hysteria or fear." His comment came after the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that another nurse had contracted the disease after treating a Liberia national who carried the virus into the country.
Thomas Eric Duncan was admitted to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital several day after he flew into Dallas from Liberia and was later and diagnosed with Ebola. He died a few days later on August 8th.
Two nurses who were part of the team caring for Duncan have contracted Ebola. Amber Vinson is being treated at Atlanta's Emory University Hospital, while Nina Pham is at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) just outside Washington.
Both cases have deeply shaken Americans' faith in the ability of the US healthcare system to contain the disease within the country after Thomas was twice sent home from hospital before being diagnosed. The fact that two nurses on his medical team have since contracted the virus have also called into question the efficacy of the preventative measures put in place to quarantine the virus within hospitals.
Obama has been criticised for not acting quickly enough to the Ebola outbreak, with many calling for him to impose a travel ban on people arriving from West Africa, a measure which he says would be ineffective and impossible to enforce.
"We can't just cut ourselves off from West Africa," Obama said in his weekly radio address Saturday. "Trying to seal off an entire region of the world - if that were even possible - could actually make the situation worse."
The worst Ebola outbreak in history has killed more than 4,500 people, most of them in the West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. The World Health Organisation has called it in "an unprecedented emergency in modern history", while senior officials at the organization have warned the virus could be the beginning of a modern iteration of the Black Death, or plague, that killed millions in medieval Europe.
The World Health Organisation has also been criticised for failing to do enough to halt the spread of Ebola since the outbreak was first detected in March. On Saturday, the WHO promised it would publish a full review of its handling of the crisis once the outbreak was under control.
That promise came after an internal document was leaked that appeared to acknowledge that the WHO had made mistakes in recognizing the seriousness of the latest Ebola outbreak.
"Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall," reads part of the report. "A perfect storm was brewing, ready to burst open in full force."
Also Saturday, Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma announced a major shake-up of the body in charge of fighting the Ebola outbreak in the country, with responsibility for containment being passed to the military.
Koroma said his defence minister would head a new national response centre reporting directly to him after the previous team, headed by the health minister, was found not to have done enough to tackle the epidemic in the country.
The Ebola outbreak has killed more than 1,200 people in Sierra Leone, and more than 4,500 across West Africa, although the WHO has warned that figure could increase to more than 10,000 per week by the beginning of next year if more is not done by the international community to contain the highly infectious disease.
In Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, the three worst-affected countries, 9,191 people have been found to have the virus, which kills 70% of those infected, according to the latest WHO figures. However, exact figures on the outbreak are unreliable as they are changing almost by the hour.
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