guardian | The Ebola epidemic, which is out of control in three countries and
directly threatening 15 others, may not end until the world has a
vaccine against the disease, according to one of the scientists who
discovered the virus.
Professor Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine, said it would not have been difficult to contain the
outbreak if those on the ground and the UN had acted promptly earlier
this year. “Something that is easy to control got completely out of
hand,” said Piot, who was part of a team that identified the causes of
the first outbreak of Ebola in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of
Congo, in 1976 and helped bring it to an end.
The scale of the epidemic in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea means
that isolation, care and tracing and monitoring contacts, which have
worked before, will not halt the spread. “It may be that we have to wait
for a vaccine to stop the epidemic,” he said.
On Thursday night, a Downing Street spokesman said a meeting of the
government’s emergency response committee, Cobra, was told the chief
medical officer still believed the risk to the UK remained low.
“There was a discussion over the need for the international community
to do much more to support the fight against the disease in the
region,” the spokesman said. “This included greater coordination of the
international effort, an increase in the amount of spending and more
support for international workers who were, or who were considering,
working in the region. The prime minister set out that he wanted to make
progress on these issues at the European council next week.”
Dr Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in
evidence to Congress, said he was confident the outbreak would be
checked in the US, but stressed the need to halt the raging west African
epidemic.
“There are no shortcuts in the control of Ebola and it is not easy to
control it. To protect the United States we need to stop it at its
source,” he said.
