World Health Organization says "one of most
challenging" Ebola outbreaks ever is spreading in West Africa.
An Ebola outbreak continues to spread in three West African
countries, and the death toll in the outbreak has risen to 337, the World
Health Organization says.
Health officials have struggled to contain the outbreak,
which is believed to have begun in Guinea, where the majority of the cases and
deaths have been.
It has also touched Sierra Leone and Liberia, where it recently
flared again after about two months with no new cases.
"This is a complex outbreak involving multiple
locations in three countries with a lot of cross-border movement among the
communities," Fadela Chaib, a spokeswoman for the UN health agency, wrote
in an email.
"This makes this one of the most challenging Ebola
outbreaks ever."
500 suspected cases
In an update published on its website on Wednesday, the
agency said that more than 500 suspected or confirmed cases of the virus had
been recorded.
That appears to be a large increase since the last update,
published about a week earlier, when the agency reported about 240 had died of
the disease. But there is sometimes a significant lag in tallying cases, and
the organisation said the numbers were constantly in flux as test results came
in.
"The jump in cases is due to reclassification,
retrospective investigation, and consolidation of cases," Chaib wrote.
This is the first time Ebola has struck three countries at
once and the first major outbreak in West Africa. Fear of the disease, for
which there is no cure, has hampered efforts to isolate the sick.
Chaib said more work was required to get sick people into
treatment facilities and to track down people that the sick had come into
contact with, so they could be monitored for symptoms.
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