The number of Ebola infections have decreased in West Africa. Aid group, Doctors without Borders and health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta are working toward a target to make West Africa "Ebola Free."
“The last case is the hardest case,” said the Director of CDC, Tom Frieden.
“We won’t get to zero simply by hoping things are going down but by intensively following up on every single possible case. We’ve got to find where the cases came from, trace them back and identify the rivulet of the flood and stanch it.”
The CDC has stepped up its response to Ebola and to curb the disease in the region. Currently, the agency has 214 staffers in West Africa working on the Ebola outbreak management. This is the highest response the CDC has shown during the Ebola outbreak sweeping West Africa with an estimated 9,000 deaths. The CDC will open new facilities in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
The U.S. government has dealt with isolated Ebola cases in the country with caution. Most of those infected were health workers and volunteers helping and assisting in taking care of patients with Ebola.
Some of these health workers were flown back to the U.S. after showing symptoms like nausea, vomiting, fever and lethargy.
President Obama appointed an Ebola czar, similar to the homeland security czar after the 9/11 attacks, demonstrating Washington's concern in the battle against the Ebola outbreak spreading in West Africa. The government is funding 10,000 African personnel engaged in the fight against Ebola.
“That footprint is larger than it’s been throughout the response,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior U.S. Agency for International Development official.
Doctors Without Borders has spiked its headcount of “rapid response” teams to contain Ebola virus spreading in difficult to reach communities, while the United Nations has assisted in bringing in ambulances and testing labs. According to reports, some communities have been violently opposed to Ebola outbreak intervention.
Officials say that decreasing the number of new infections from 1,000 to 100 a week was essential in getting a stronghold on Ebola. The strategy broke the curve of the epidemic. However, the WHO and other agencies are seeing a sudden uptick of Ebola virus infections recently, say reports.
“You really need to follow the trail, the epidemiological puzzle, to make sure you don’t miss that one person or one family that could start another flash somewhere,” said Ebola task force operations coordinator run by Doctors Without Borders, Henry Gray.
“Everybody needs to see this through to the end.”
“As we have seen time and time again, an upsurge in new cases can follow a single unsafe burial or violent act of community resistance. Both of these high-risk situations are still occurring,” World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan said at a WHO executive board meeting in Geneva.
“We know that not all cases, and especially not all deaths, are being detected and reported.”
