Ebola Cases To Triple To 20,000 By Nov Unless Efforts Raised: WHO

GENEVA: The number of Ebola infections will triple to 20,000 by November, soaring by the thousands every week if efforts are not significantly stepped up to stop the outbreak, the WHO warned today.

"Without drastic improvements in control measures, the numbers of cases of and deaths from Ebola are expected to continue increasing from hundreds to thousands per week in the coming months," the World Health Organization said in a study.

The current outbreak in West Africa has already claimed more than 2,800 lives and infected more than 5,800 people.

But the WHO study forecasts that if no significant action is taken, "the cumulative number of confirmed and probable cases by November 2 ... Will be 5,925 in Guinea, 9,939 in Liberia and 5,063 in Sierra Leone".

The total for those three countries alone will therefore surpass 20,000 cases, said the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine today.

That would also translate to a jump in the number of deaths as the experts suggest that the fatality in the current outbreak is much higher than the widely estimated one in two.

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