NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 19 (Sputnik) – The Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa is slowly being brought under control, Dr. Ariel Pablos-Mendez, assistant administrator for global health at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has announced.
"What we are seeing now are a lot of good results on the ground in Liberia," Mendez told reporters in New York on Wednesday, adding that "Sierra Leone, until recently, was growing exponentially and we are beginning to see some impact of the scale-up of the efforts there".
"In Guinea, the situation was never as exponential as the other two countries, but we need to strengthen them. As long as there is a single case of Ebola walking around, that case can reignite the epidemic," the official stressed.
The current Ebola epidemic started at the end of 2013 in southern Guinea and later spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Senegal. Since then, Senegal and Nigeria have been declared free of the virus by the World Health Organization (WHO), with Liberia having recently lifted its state of emergency.
According to the latest WHO data, Ebola has killed a total of 5,177 people, with the number of confirmed, probable and suspected Ebola cases having climbed to almost 14,500.
There is no officially approved medication for the disease, but several countries, including Russia, are currently developing Ebola vaccines.
