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TORONTO -- The unprecedented spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa may be pushing the world toward a viral disaster, a commentary published in Friday's New York Times suggests.
The article reveals that experts are worried ongoing transmission of the virus through people runs the risk of giving rise to mutations that might allow Ebola to spread through the air, like some of the world's most contagious viruses. The virus currently spreads when a person has contact with contaminated bodily fluids.
The article bears the headline: What We're Afraid to Say About Ebola. It was written by Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy.
It is among the first signs that experts who have been watching the outbreak with mounting alarm are ready to go public with grave concerns about an Ebola outbreak that is unlike any the world has ever seen.
To date nearly 4,800 people have been infected and roughly 2,400 have died, the World Health Organization said Friday. The global health agency has repeatedly cautioned that its numbers are likely an underestimate.
A few weeks back the WHO warned that 20,000 people might be infected before this outbreak is over. That's nearly 50 times as many cases as the largest Ebola outbreak on record before now.
Before this epidemic, fewer than 3,000 people were known to have contracted the virus in roughly 19 outbreaks dating back to 1976. So when the 20,000 figure was raised, it was almost an unthinkable number.
Now some experts believe 20,000 is optimistic. A modelling study, released Thursday in the online journal Eurosurveillance, suggested that if the pace of new cases continues as it has, there could be between 77,000 and 277,000 additional Ebola cases before the end of 2014.
The authors of that study called that a worse-case scenario and said the scale of containment efforts should prevent case numbers from getting that high. But they said that as of Aug. 26, there was no indication the efforts were turning the tide.
And the aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres said Friday there still isn't. The group, which is also known as Doctors Without Borders, recently called for governments with military field hospitals to deploy those resources to the Ebola zone. The response has been modest at best.
"To this day, the pledges to dispatch field hospitals with isolation capacity remains light years away from what is needed on the ground," the group said Friday.
"If we add up the commitments that we have heard of, we barely reach 100 extra beds when more than a thousand are needed in Liberia and Sierra Leone. In Monrovia, for example, an estimated 1,200 beds in isolated wards are needed, but only 240 are available -- including 160 provided by MSF. These new centres must serve affected people regardless where they are from or their profession."
That last remark was likely a reference to the fact that earlier this week the U.S. Pentagon said it would send a 25-bed field hospital to Liberia -- to treat health-care workers who become infected with Ebola.
MSF said that without places for the sick to go, there is no way to keep the infected from spreading the disease to family or friends who take care of them.
Viruses like Ebola mutate constantly. And each time an animal virus such as Ebola infects a person, it has the chance to develop mutations that make it better adapted to spreading among people.
No one knows what cycling Ebola viruses through so many people would mean in terms of the virus's evolution. But scientists who study Ebola -- one of the deadliest viruses to afflict humankind -- would prefer not to watch the experiment in action.
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