Ebola Now Poses a Threat to National Security in West Africa
By Dina Fine Maron
ScientificAmerican.com
Sep 2, 2014
The Ebola virus outbreak entrenched in west Africa has become a real risk to the stability and security of society in the region, the top U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official said today after returning yesterday from a visit there.
Failure to tamp down Ebola’s spread is stressing the infrastructure of countries stricken with the disease that must still continue to provide basic health and security services and promote routine commercial activity. Fear of its spread is also hindering care for other maladies and may increasingly put the stability of neighboring nations at risk, said CDC director Tom Frieden in a press conference today. “It’s a problem for the world and the world needs to respond,” he said. The outbreak has spread from Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria to include Senegal. Fortunately, a separate smaller Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo does not appear to be related to the west African cases.
More than 70 CDC employees are currently working on the ground to help respond to the outbreak in west Africa that has killed more than 1,500 and sickened 3,000. Yet so far, response efforts from national governments and international aid organizations has fallen vastly short of containing the spread of Ebola and the infection is only expected to grow to more than 20,000 people. “The virus is moving faster than anyone anticipated,” Frieden said. Bodies are not getting buried fast enough to meet demand and quickly scaling up the needed response to keep individual cases from becoming large outbreaks continues to be a struggle. Ongoing exposures to the bodily fluids of the dead and those caring for Ebola patients are feeding the epidemic. Also hindering the response to the disease: symptoms of other endemic diseases in the region like malaria and typhoid may initially appear similar to Ebola.
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