2015-01-16 11:10:00

Ebola cases decline in West Africa


(Vatican Radio) The UN’s Special Envoy on Ebola says the intensity of the Ebola outbreak in west Africa is slowly reducing and the goal of reaching zero new cases looks achievable.

Dr. David Nabarro said the number of daily new cases in recent weeks has been 50 or less, and the numbers have been dropping steadily.

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To date, more than 21,000 people contracted the virus and about 8,500 have died. The most-affected countries remain Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Flare-ups of the virus have occurred in certain areas but health teams are capable of “quite rapid action to get people under treatment and to try to find out the cause,” Nabarro said, according to a United Nations website.

“In September, the outbreak was accelerating ahead and we were very worried that the outbreak was outstripping the response,” he said.

“I’ve been on six visits to the region,” he continued. “When I started in August, it was frightening. We really didn’t know what was going on. I would say to people, ‘We don’t know what the next few weeks are going to be like’. And we were bracing ourselves for some very bad news. And there was bad news.

“But in the last few weeks, we’ve seen a big shift, a sense that it can be beaten,” he said. “It started in early December in Liberia, some parts of the country which had been so badly affected beforehand, reporting near-zero or zero cases.”

The start of the new year saw the biggest decline of the virus in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

He said there is a sense among those involved in fighting the disease that it can be beaten.








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