'Perfect storm' for Ebola to spread, says virus pioneerPeter Piot, the Belgian scientist who co-discovered the http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/?searchtext=Ebola&searchbutton=SEARCH - Ebola virus in 1976, on Tuesday said a "perfect storm" in West Africa had given the disease a chance to spread unchecked. "We have never seen an ( http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/?searchtext=Ebola&searchbutton=SEARCH - Ebola ) epidemic on this scale," Piot was quoted by the French daily Liberation as saying. "In
the last six months, we have been witnessing what can be described as a
'perfect storm' -- everything is there for it to snowball." The epidemic "is exploding in countries where health services are not functioning, ravaged by decades of civil war," Piot said. "In
addition, the public is deeply suspicious of the authorities. Trust
must be restored. Nothing can be done in an epidemic like http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/?searchtext=Ebola&searchbutton=SEARCH - Ebola if there is no trust." Piot
is former chief of the UN agency UNAIDS and now director of the London
School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, one of the world's foremost
centres of expertise on tropical disease. In the interview, he also castigated "the extraordinary slowness" of international organisations in responding to the outbreak. "The
World Health Organization (WHO) only woke up in July," whereas the
epidemic began in December last year and health experts sounded the
alarm in early March, said Piot. "There is now leadership but it is late," he said. The
epidemic has killed 1,427 people out of more than 2,600 known cases of
infection, with doctors and nurses paying a particularly heavy price. The
epidemic is focussed on Liberia and Sierra Leone, which were wracked by
conflict in the 1990s and the early part of the last decade, and on
neighbouring Guinea. Other cases have been recorded in Nigeria,
whose north is hit by unrest, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
whose east is in the grip of a decades-old conflict and where http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/?searchtext=Ebola&searchbutton=SEARCH - Ebola was first identified in 1976. http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/health/article/2000132752/perfect-storm-for-ebola-to-spread-says-virus-pioneer
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