Burial team prepares body of Ebola virus victim in Freetown, Sierra Leone. “The situation is catastrophic. There are several villages and communities that have been basically wiped out. In one of the villages I went to, there were 40 inhabitants and 39 died,” he said. The World Health Organization (WHO) published revised figures on Friday showing 4,951 people have died of Ebola and there was a total of 13,567 reported cases. “The WHO says there is a correction factor of 2. 5, so maybe it is 2. 5 times higher and maybe that is not far from the truth. It could be 10,000, 15,000 or 20,000,” said Zachariah.
He stressed that “whole communities have disappeared but many of them are not in the statistics. The situation on the ground is actually much worse. ” He added that in some places the local healthcare systems were overwhelmed. “You have one nurse for 10,000 people and then you lose 10, 11, 12 nurses. How is the health system going to work? ” After isolated cases in Europe, “we might get a vaccine and a treatment… but even now we need to go much faster because the clock is ticking,” he said. “We want action now. ” (The news briefs above are from wire reports and staff reports posted at YahooNews on Oct.
29, Reuters on Nov. 3 & Daily Telegraph on Oct. 30 and YahooNews on Oct. 31. ) Summary: The article highlights the devastating number of deaths caused from Ebola and the villages that are being wiped out in Sierra Leone. Doctors without Borders are seeing a high number of deaths, but the WHO organization isn’t as accurate as one may think. This is a problem because Ebola is spreading to outside areas, especially areas that may have never encountered it.
This leaves many questions unanswered and not many people being able to help since the communities are being wiped out from the disease. Vocabulary: Catastrophic- of the nature of a catastrophe, or disastrous event; calamitous. Involving or resulting in substantial, often ruinous medical expense. Geography: Sierra Leone is on the Atlantic Ocean in West Africa. Guinea, in the north and east, and Liberia, in the south, are its neighbors.
Mangrove swamps lie along the coast, with wooded hills and a plateau in the interior. The eastern region is mountainous. Reaction/Conclusion: The article is covering the continuous outbreak of Ebola, even though it has existed as the norm in Africa.
The number of deaths increasing, but the numbers through organizations isn’t adding up and this doesn’t help the situation. By not being accurate how can we know for sure who has died and where the next outbreak of Ebola will be? There are barely enough health professionals in the area, so if they’re being wiped out by the disease the spread will just take over more areas.
I think organizations should keep better track of the disease and do better at quarantining the infected individuals so entire communities are no longer wiped out. POWERED BY TCPDF (WWW. TCPDF. ORG).