Search Here

A senior WHO official on Tuesday warned that the number of Ebola cases per week could rise up to 10,000.

"By December 2014, 5,000 to 10,000 Ebola cases per week anticipated in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone," said Dr. Bruce Aylward, WHO Assistant Director-General in charge of the operational response to the Ebola outbreak, in a press release.

He added that the estimates would be breached if international community did not step its response to combating the outbreak in 60 days.

On Tuesday, the WHO also revised the death count. It reported 8,914 infections and 4,447 deaths.

Aylward also said that 95 percent of the cases are being reported from Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia in the past one month.

"If we look at the reported number of cases over the last four weeks and we take seven day blocks for which we have full data, it's been running about a thousand cases a week now for about three to four weeks. A couple of people have looked at that and said, well, what's going on? Is the epidemic slowing down or are we not seeing the exponential growth? And quite frankly it's too early to say. Because as most of you know these numbers go up and down. The lab sometimes can't keep up with the amount of specimens they're getting," VOA quoted him saying.

Commenting on disease fighting measures, he said that WHO wants to see a reduction in weekly numbers in three worst affected countries 90 days.

"Our goal is by 60 days we are able to identify all chains of Ebola transmissions in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone. By 90 days, we want to start seeing week-by-week decline in number of cases in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone," he said.

The Ebola epidemic began in March this year, severely affecting the economy of West Africa.