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Ebola will not go quietly, says WHO official after rise in cases
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Guinea and Sierra Leone have reported 35 new Ebola cases in the past week, four times as many as the week before, in a reminder that the virus “will not go quietly”, a World Health Organisation official has said.
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“It will take an extraordinary effort to finish the job,” the WHO’s special representative for Ebola, Bruce Aylward, told a briefing attended by health ministers.
“With the start of the rainy season today, the doubling of effort will be that much more difficult, that much more important,” he added, referring to increased logistical challenges for health workers.
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The 35 new cases in the week to 17 May were in six districts of Guinea and Sierra Leone, with most infections in Guinea, Aylward said. Nine new cases were confirmed the previous week.
Liberia, the other worst-hit country, was declared Ebola-free this month.
Related: Liberia is free of Ebola, WHO declares
On Monday the WHO said it was setting up a $100m (£64m) contingency fund to ensure it will not be “overwhelmed” by a crisis again as it was with Ebola, which has killed more than 11,000 people since December 2013.
“The virus, in this case Ebola, has shown how easy it is for a single cross-border traveller or unsafe burial to reignite the epidemic again,” the WHO director general, Margaret Chan, told Tuesday’s two-hour briefing. “We have come too far to allow things to slip back.”
Guinea’s health minister, Remy Lamah, said authorities were searching out Ebola cases but traditional cultural practices such as washing dead bodies were still proving hard to overcome.
“There are certain cases of dissent with respect to measures taken in parts of the country but it is going down,” he said.
Sierra Leone’s chief medical officer, Brima Kargbo, said there were signs that its strategy was working. “One lesson we have learned is that good is not good enough. We need continued vigilance with a focus on hotspot districts,” Kargbo said.
