Ebola could strike 20,000 in six weeks, "rumble on for years" - study

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa could infect 20,000 people as soon as early November unless rigorous infection control measures are implemented, and might "rumble on" for years in a holding pattern, researchers said on Tuesday.

In an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, experts from the World Health Organization and Imperial College said that infections will continue climbing exponentially unless patients are isolated, contacts traced and communities enlisted.

The WHO, in an initial roadmap issued on Aug 28, predicted that the virus could strike 20,000 people within the next nine months. The current death toll is at least 2,811 out of 5,864 cases, the U.N. agency says.

The latest study, marking six months from March 23, when the WHO says it was informed of the Ebola outbreak in southeastern Guinea, reflects projections based on the data from a third wave of the virus in Guinea, Sierra Leone and worst-hit Liberia.

"With exponential growth, you'll see that

FG monitoring 400 contacts of doctor who died of Ebola

Dr. Abdulsalami Nasidi, project director at Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, has said about 400 people are being monitored for signs of Ebola after they came in contact with a Port Harcourt doctor who died of the disease but hid the fact that he had been exposed.

Nasidi said, on Thursday, there was a sense of “hopelessness” due to the lack of proven drugs or vaccines to treat Ebola that has infected 18 people in Africa’s most populous nation.

In an interview with Reuters in Geneva, he said that more isolation wards were being opened in the oil industry hub but voiced confidence that there would not be “many cases” there.

After having contact with an Ebola patient and before his own death on

US CDC in talks with Nigeria over human trial of Ebola vaccine

Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in USA are in talks with health officials in Nigeria about the prospects for conducting a phase 1 safety study of the Ebola vaccine among healthy adults in the country amid mounting anxiety about the spread of the deadly virus in West Africa, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The pace of human safety testing for experimental Ebola vaccines has been expedited in response to the ongoing virus outbreak in West Africa which has impacted negatively on businesses in the three affected countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, with neighbouring countries closing their borders and banning flights from affected countries to other parts of Africa.

NIH explained that

Doctor dies of Ebola in Port Harcourt

Dan Nwomeh, a Ministry of Health spokesman, said Thursday that a doctor in Port Harcourt has died from Ebola fever.

The doctor was infected he treated a primary contact of Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian-American who brought the dreaded disease to Nigeria.

His death brings the number of Ebola fatalities in Nigeria to 6.

The total number of recorded cases had risen by two to 15, the other one being the wife of the doctor who is showing Ebola symptoms and whose test results are awaited.

Nwomeh said 70 contacts of the doctor were now under surveillance in Port Harcourt.

The news came two days after Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said