Discoverer Peter Piot says the world is 'waking up' to threat of Ebola
The scientist who is widely credited with discovering the Ebola virus says the world finally is "waking up" to the epidemic sweeping West Africa but that the situation remains dire and nowhere near being contained.
The scientist who is widely credited with discovering the Ebola virus says the world finally is "waking up" to the epidemic sweeping West Africa but that the situation remains dire and nowhere near being contained.
"This outbreak has become a real humanitarian crisis, which will go on for quite a while," said Peter Piot, the director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, after a World Health Organisation review of the Ebola outbreak that is sweeping Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Piot, a Belgian who co-discovered the Ebola virus in 1976, even raised the prospect that patients who were not infected with Ebola were dying because the outbreak had so compromised the health-care systems of those countries.
"The challenge now is to coordinate that," Piot said.
At least 3,481 people had died in West Africa as of last Friday, the WHO reported. It also has taken a heavy toll among health workers, with 382 infected and 216 dying.
"Many health facilities are empty," Philippe Calain, a virologist with the aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres, said.
That was because so many health personnel have been infected and the fear the centres were helping spread the disease.
