Amidst growing fear over the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and with a medical charity group describing the outbreak as unprecedented, the World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday said that the epidemic is relatively small.
International humanitarian group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said that the Ebola outbreak which is believed to have so far infected more than one hundred and killed over 80 in Guinea and has already spread to neighboring countries Sierra Leone and Liberia, is of the Zaire strain, the most lethal and aggressive of ebola strains raising more concerns over the outbreak.
"We are facing an epidemic of a magnitude never before seen in terms of the distribution of cases in the country," said MSF Conakry project coordinator Mariano Lugli in a press release.
The MSF has warned that the outbreak is unprecedented as it was happening in several locations and the diseases has already reached Guinea's capital that Conakry believed to be home to almost a quarter of the country's population. The charity group has already criticized governments and international health organizations for not doing enough about the situation.
The World Health Organization, however, has apparently downplayed MSF'S estimate of the outbreak as it said that there had already been larger outbreaks in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the past and this is not the first time that ebola was detected in a capital city.
"This is relatively small still. The biggest outbreaks have been over 400 cases," said WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl. "Ebola already causes enough concern and we need to be very careful about how we characterize something which is up until now an outbreak with sporadic cases."
Ebola, a highly fatal disease with no known treatment and vaccine was first identified in Sudan and Zaire in 1976. The disease is characterized by high fever, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding and severe headache and is transmitted from wild animals to humans who spread the disease to other humans through direct body contact.
Health workers who are in direct contact with infected patients are always among the first to die so they are advised to take extra precautions such as wearing biohazard suites so they won't get infected by their patients.
