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Ebola Outbreak Could End Next Year: U.N. Official
The intense international response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa could help end the outbreak in 2015, according to the doctor leading the United Nations’ fight against the deadly disease.
However, the effort to contain the outbreak that has killed nearly 5,000 people is not even a quarter done, Dr. David Nabarro added.
“Until the last case of Ebola is under treatment, we have to stay on full alert,” he told the Associated Press. “It’s still bad.”
Just one month ago, the number of Ebola cases was likely doubling every three to four weeks. But in the past four weeks, infection rates appear to be slowing in some regions of West Africa, Nabarro said.
In other areas though, Ebola cases seem to be increasing at the same speed they were a month ago, he told the AP.
Nabarro said a number of factors have “made me incredibly optimistic that in the coming months we could certainly see a diminution, and hopefully in the next year the outbreak will come to an end.”
However, “we are really not saying to the world that the job is even half done or a quarter done,” he told the AP.
“We’re simply saying we had a strategy and the strategy predicted that as things got implemented, numbers of cases wouldn’t increase at the rate they were increasing in August and September,” Nabarro explained.
While that’s what is happening, “I’m afraid I cannot say to you that it looks as if we’re over the worst,” he added.
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