Jennifer Curtiss
Ebola Cases Could Rise to 1.4 Million in 4 Months, CDC says

The Ebola virus has arrived right on our doorstep here in Dallas. That is why I chose to summarize an article on this topic to educate myself as much as possible. This article discusses the possibility that by January 2015, the cases of the deadly Ebola virus could rapidly rise to 1.4 million in 4 months. This is situation is not quite likely to happen, but precautions need to be taken now to prevent this outbreak. Martin Meltzer from the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, the CDC, and colleagues are the ones that created a modeling tool to show containment efforts in this fight against Ebola. The director of the CDC, Thomas Frieden is encouraging that a surge start now to contain the epidemic. Already, there are 120 people from the CDC in Africa and there is a joint force command in Liberia. Making more treatment units available and qualified staff to care for the sick. The key to getting control of the Ebola outbreak is isolation. But if there is a delay in taking action, the amount of cases exponentially increase and gaining control becomes much more difficult. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that unless epidemic control dramatically improves, we could be getting reports from the countries that are already reporting high numbers of the infected, that they have close to 20,000 affected by November! The WHO warns that if the forceful use of control measures is not used then Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone could be where Ebola is endemic. Also in this report, the estimated overall fatality rate is 70.8%. I am hoping that the stance the CDC is taking that this is a highly unlikely situation and that if action is taken now, the epidemic can be contained. United Nations, other nations in Europe and Asia have begun their efforts to isolate any cases. As of September 23, there are 5843 related cases of Ebola, 2803 deaths which include 337 healthcare