msn | The Ebola outbreak that has
claimed more than 1,000 lives in west Africa is moving faster than aid
organisations can handle, the medical charity MSF said Friday.
The warning came a day after the
World Health Organization said the scale of the epidemic had been vastly
underestimated and that "extraordinary measures" were needed to contain
the killer disease.
The
UN health agency said the death toll from the worst outbreak of the
disease in four decades had now climbed to 1,069 in the four afflicted
countries, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and .
"It is deteriorating faster, and moving faster, than we can respond to," (Doctors Without Borders) chief Joanne Liu told reporters in Geneva, saying it could take six months to get the upper hand.
"It is like wartime," she said a day after returning from the region where she met political leaders and visited clinics.
WHO said Thursday it was coordinating "a massive scaling up of the international response" to the epidemic.
"Staff
at the outbreak sites see evidence that the numbers of reported cases
and deaths vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak," it said.
The
latest epidemic erupted in the forested zone straddling the borders of
Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and later spread to Nigeria.
WHO
declared a global health emergency last week -- far too late, according
to MSF, which months ago warned that the outbreak was out of control.
Liu
said while Guinea was the initial epicentre of the disease, the pace
there has slowed, with concerns now focused on the other countries.
"If we don't stabilise Liberia, we'll never stabilise the region," Liu said.
Concerns have also centred on the Nigerian cases, which are in Lagos, sub-Saharan Africa's largest city.
"Right now we have no past experience with in urban setting," said Liu.
