It keeps coming up in the news, and even though it all seems very far away, a lot of the headlines are making people uneasy. So, what’s really happening with the Ebola outbreak?
Ebola Isn’t Going Away
From the first recorded current case in December 2013 in Guinea where a 2-year-old boy died a few days after falling ill, to dozens dying in 8 Guinean villages in March 2014, suspected cases started turning up in neighbouring countries.
In July 2014 the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported the first Ebola case in Nigeria. Here’s a timeline from then until now:
August 2014
- The first case of Ebola is reported in Senegal.
- Cases are reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo that are believed to be unrelated to the West Africa outbreak, and a quarantine zone is established in the region.
- WHO states that more than half of 240 infected health workers have died.
- The first confirmed British citizen to contract the virus in Sierra Leone is transported to the Royal Free Hospital in North London, and one of three infected African doctors dies, despite being treated with experimental drug ZMapp.
- Spain issues travel warnings for all affected countries.
- Two infected American aid workers are flown from Liberia to Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital for treatment. They are the first patients of the outbreak in the US.
September 2014
- WHO announced that the unrelated outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has 53 possible and confirmed cases and 31 deaths.
- Two Spanish missionaries are evacuated from their posts in West Africa, and repatriated to Spain – one of the priests, Manuel Garcia Viejo, is ill and he dies on 25 September.
October 2014
- A separate epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo kills 42 people.
- Liberia says that all of its regions have been infected.
- An NBC cameraman is infected in Liberia, the sixth US national to be contaminated. Almost all are treated in the US.
- A Ugandan doctor infected in Sierra Leone becomes the second person treated in Germany, where a Senegalese expert is declared healed on October 4.
- First infection outside Africa, of a Spanish nurse in a Madrid hospital. A priest died in the hospital in August and another missionary died there on September 25.
- Norwegian doctor working for MSF is repatriated after becoming infected in Sierra Leone.
- Teresa Romero Ramos, a 40-year-old Spanish nursing assistant tests positive for the deadly virus after nursing Viejo.
- A Texan health worker who treated the first man to die of Ebola in the US appears also to be infected, having tested positive during a preliminary blood test.
November 2014
A new outbreak of Ebola comes as fresh figures show that Ebola is spreading nine times faster in parts of Sierra Leone than it was 2 months ago. A report from the country’s Ebola 117 hotline says there were 12 new cases a day in late October in the rural areas surrounding the capital Freetown, compared with an average of 1.3 cases in early September.
According to the Centers for Disease Control on 07 December 2014 the current number of confirmed infections was 17,908 and the death toll stood at 6,373.
Sources: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/04/ebola-outbreak-sierra-leone , http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/04/ebola-zaire-peter-piot-outbreak, http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/2014-west-africa/case-counts.html