Update | Second Texas Ebola case as UN warns infections could to soar to ‘10,000 a week’
Warning comes as second Texas healthcare worker tests positive for Ebola
The world is falling behind in a desperate race stop the deadly Ebola outbreak, a top UN official warned on Tuesday amid dire predictions that thousands of new infections are possible before year’s end.
“Ebola got a head start on us,” said Anthony Banbury, head of the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response.
“It is far ahead of us, it is running faster than us, and it is winning the race,” the Briton told the UN Security Council in New York, by remote link from UNMEER headquarters in Accra, Ghana.
“If Ebola wins, we the peoples of the United Nations lose so very much,” he said.
The worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, who cared for Thomas Eric Duncan, was immediately isolated after reporting a fever on Tuesday, the department said.
“Health officials have interviewed the latest patient to quickly identify any contacts or potential exposures, and those people will be monitored,” the department said.
The news comes just days after another nurse, 26-year-old Nina Pham, became the first person infected by Ebola in the United States while caring for Duncan during much of his 11 days in the hospital. He died on October 8.
“We either stop Ebola now or we face an entirely unprecedented situation for which we do not have a plan,” Banbury stressed.
He said that with infection rates rising exponentially every day, UNMEER will need 7,000 beds for treatment.
“There’s much bad news about Ebola but the good news is we know how to stop it,” said Banbury.
But to push back the spread “we must defeat Ebola and we must do it fast,” he said.
The latest death toll is 4,447, from 8,914 recorded infection cases, Aylward said as the worst-ever Ebola outbreak spirals in the three hardest-hit countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
The WHO has called current Ebola outbreak the most severe in modern times.
On Monday, US President Barack Obama and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for the international campaign against the haemorrhagic virus, which is killing seven out of every ten people infected, to be intensified.
Governments in west Africa have been scrambling to contain the epidemic, with patients in the Liberian capital describing devastating scenes as patients struggled to survive during a strike by health workers.
Outside west Africa, medical staff have also been particularly at risk during the crisis, with at least two cases of contamination reported despite stringent safety protocols.
Meanwhile, a nurse in the city of Dallas, Texas, Nina Pham, said she was “doing well” after catching the virus while caring for a Liberian Ebola patient, but authorities warned 76 workers may have been exposed during his 10-day stay in the hospital.
Spanish nurse Teresa Romero, 44, is thought to have caught Ebola while treating an elderly missionary who was infected in Sierra Leone and died on September 25.