Ebola Winning The Race, Says UN Official Anthony Banbury

The UN’s Ebola mission chief says the world is falling behind in the race to contain the virus, with thousands of new cases predicted by December.

“It is running faster than us, and it is winning the race,” Anthony Banbury told the UN Security Council.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says 4,447 people have died from the outbreak, mainly in West Africa.

Meanwhile, a second health worker in the US state of Texas has become infected with the virus.

Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea have been hardest hit by the epidemic, which began in December 2013 but was confirmed only in March.

In other developments:

• Liberia’s transport minister has gone into quarantine after the death of her personal driver from the virus
• Guinea’s president has called upon the country’s retired doctors to help out in the fight against Ebola
• A football player for Sierra Leone’s national team says his team-mates have been stigmatised and humiliated as result of the Ebola outbreak

US President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that “the world as a whole is not doing enough” to contain the Ebola threat.

He will discuss the Ebola crisis in a video conference on Wednesday with British, French, German and Italian leaders, the White House says.

Mr Banbury issued a stern warning on Tuesday, telling the UN Security Council by video-link from West Africa that if Ebola was not stopped now, the world would “face an entirely unprecedented situation for which we do not have a plan”.

He called for more money to build treatment centres and for more medical personnel to staff them.

It follows the WHO’s latest projections suggesting the infection rate could reach 5,000 to 10,000 new cases a week within two months if global efforts to combat the spread of infection were not stepped up.

There have been 8,914 cases overall, including the fatal cases, and the WHO says it expects this number to top 9,000 by the end of the week.

The WHO estimates its figures by taking the numbers of confirmed cases and multiplying them – from Guinea by 1.5, from Sierra Leone by 2 and from Liberia by 2.5 – to account for under-reporting.

WHO assistant director-general Bruce Aylward said on Tuesday that the rate of infections appeared to be slowing in the “historic epicentre” of the outbreak, but warned that it was too early to read this as success.

In the US state of Texas, a second health worker has tested positive for Ebola. The worker’s identity has not been revealed but the person is said to have cared for a Liberian man, Thomas Duncan, who later died from the virus.

The first health worker to have been infected in Texas, 26-year-old Nina Pham, is receiving treatment. The female nurse also contracted the disease after treating Mr Duncan, who was the first person to be diagnosed with the virus on US soil.

Her colleagues at a Dallas hospital say they worked without adequate protective clothing and received little guidance on preventing the spread of the virus.

The head of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Thomas Frieden, has said there had been a breach of protocol by health workers that led to Ms Pham becoming infected.

However, the head of the national nurses union, Roseann DeMoro, questioned this. “The CDC is saying that protocols were breached, but the nurses are saying there were no protocols,” she told reporters.

Doctors at the Health Presbyterian hospital said Ms Pham was in good condition on Tuesday.

(BBC)