Study warns swift action needed to curb exponential climb in Ebola outbreak
FollowInvestigation of new data expands information on spread of outbreak and case fatality rate.
Unless Ebola control measures in west Africa are enhanced quickly, experts from the WHO and Imperial College, London, predict numbers will continue to climb exponentially, and more than 20 000 people will have been infected by early November, according to a new article in the New England Journal of Medicine released 6 months after WHO was first notified of the outbreak in west Africa.
In the article, public health epidemiologists and statisticians reviewed data since the beginning of the outbreak in December 2013 to determine the scale of the epidemic, better understand the spread of the disease, and what it will take to reverse the trend of infections.
Scale of epidemic
Although WHO was first notified of the outbreak on 23 March 2014, investigations retroactively revealed the outbreak started in December 2013. Between 30 December 2013 and 14 September 2014, a total of 4507 cases were reported to WHO.
The data in the study help clarify some details of who is most affected by this outbreak. For example, there have been mixed reports on whether women might be harder hit because they are more likely to care for sick, or whether it would be men who might be more likely to bury the highly-infectious dead bodies.
“This study gave us some real insight into how this outbreak was working, for example, we learned there is no significant difference among the different countries in the total numbers of male and female case patients,