2014 Goals for Ebola Treatment May Not Be Met, U.N. Health Officials Say – NYTimes.com.
GENEVA — The World Health Organizationexpressed doubt on Monday about achieving important United Nationsbenchmarks in battling Ebola, saying the year-end goals of isolating and treating all patients and safely burying all the dead would be major challenges.
However, the W.H.O. said, significant progress has been made in reversing the upward trajectory of Ebola cases in many places across the three West African countries ravaged by the disease.
Among the biggest challenges now, the agency’s top official for the Ebola response said, is to track down every person potentially exposed. To do this, the organization plans to nearly double the number of its experts on the ground to assist 20,000 community health workers.
“To get to zero you have to find every case,” the official, Bruce Aylward, assistant director general for emergencies, told reporters at a briefing here.
The geography of Ebola has shifted, further complicating the efforts to eradicate it: For instance, in Guinea, Ebola is now thought to be in nearly twice as many districts as it was just two months ago, when the United Nations established a new mission to coordinate the international response. And in Sierra Leone, Ebola is ravaging the western part of the country, while only a handful of new cases are surfacing in previous hot spots.
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