Paris (AFP) - Peter
Piot, the Belgian scientist who co-discovered the Ebola virus in 1976, on
Tuesday said a "perfect storm" in West Africa had given the disease a
chance to spread unchecked.
"We have never seen
an (Ebola) epidemic on this scale," Piot was quoted by the French daily Liberation
as saying.
"In the last six
months, we have been witnessing what can be described as a 'perfect storm' everything
is there for it to snowball."
The epidemic "is
exploding in countries where health services are not functioning, ravaged by
decades of civil war," Piot said.
"In addition, the
public is deeply suspicious of the authorities. Trust must be restored. Nothing
can be done in an epidemic like Ebola if there is no trust."
Piot is former chief of
the UN agency UNAIDS and now director of the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine, one of the world's foremost centres of expertise on tropical
disease.
In the interview, he
also castigated "the extraordinary slowness" of international
organisations in responding to the outbreak.
"The World Health
Organization (WHO) only woke up in July," whereas the epidemic began in
December last year and health experts sounded the alarm in early March, said
Piot.
"There is now
leadership but it is late," he said.
The epidemic has killed
1,427 people out of more than 2,600 known cases of infection, with doctors and
nurses paying a particularly heavy price.
The epidemic is focussed
on Liberia and Sierra Leone, which were wracked by conflict in the 1990s and
the early part of the last decade, and on neighbouring Guinea.
Other cases have been
recorded in Nigeria, whose north is hit by unrest, and in the Democratic
Republic of Congo, whose east is in the grip of a decades-old conflict and
where Ebola was first identified in 1976.
DRC Health Minister
Felix Kabanga Numbi last Sunday said that the country's seventh recorded Ebola
outbreak had "no link to (the epidemic) in west Africa
Source: YAHOO NEWS
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