Containment of the Ebola outbreak requires isolation of infected people while they are receiving treatment, as well as safe and dignified burials, World Health Organization spokeswoman Winifred Romeril told RT.
RT:We have comparative numbers for killer contagious viruses, for example flu’s death toll is up to half a million a year and pneumonia kills about 4 million per year. From the start of the Ebola outbreak, it has killed at least 4000 people. So why is Ebola getting this level of concern when other infections are claiming far more lives?
Winifred Romeril: Ebola is scary because it’s so lethal. You don’t infect many people, when one person gets ill, they maybe infect two people. But right now maybe half of those people or higher might die. I think that that’s a reason for concern because it is so virulent.
RT: So meaning almost 100 percent lethality, can we say that Ebola is a real killer?
WR: It is. Certainly you will find people in the countries that have been affected saying that it really gets to the heart of our culture. Like we see in some of these West African nations where people are very affectionate, they hug a lot, they care for the people around them, and you can get Ebola from people who are infected by being in contact with them… When people are sick, people take care about each other, and that’s the time when people are most infectious, when they are already quite ill.
RT: Ebola was discovered in the 1970s, and the world has already seen other Ebola outbreaks. Why wasn’t it stopped when the first cases of infected people were discovered?
WR: It wasn’t diagnosed as soon as other outbreaks mostly because it mimics a lot of other diseases. Ebola has never been seen in this area of Africa before – in West Africa they’ve never dealt with Ebola. When it broke out it was actually in the middle of a time when other diseases were on an upswing – malaria, cholera and other diseases that look like this. So there were tests on someone for cholera, for example, or malaria, that test would come back positive and they thought “oh, this person is so sick because of this disease that we confirmed they have.”
