African Ebola outbreak like ‘wartime’, food shortages threaten

Friday, August 15, 2014
By Paul Martin

By Stephanie Nebehay and and Clair MacDougall
Reuters.com
Fri Aug 15, 2014

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has created a “wartime” situation, including the threat of food shortages, and could take six months to bring under control, medical charity MSF and the Liberian government said on Friday.

With global alarm rising over the worst outbreak of the virus that has killed more than 1,000 people so far, MSF (Doctors Without Borders) questioned whether the World Health Organisation (WHO) had moved quickly enough to declare it a “public health emergency of international concern”, which it did on Aug 8.

On Thursday, the WHO said its staff had seen evidence the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimated the scale of the outbreak and said it would coordinate “a massive scaling up of the international response”.

MSF President Joanne Liu, speaking after a 10-day trip to West Africa, compared the outbreak, which has ravaged Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea and touched Nigeria, to a “wartime” situation. “It’s like a frontline, it’s moving, it’s advancing, but we have no clue as to how it is going to go around.”

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