Ebola is outpacing both government response and charities. Yahoo/AFP

Riot police disperse a crowd that had gathered to watch a dead Ebola victim being moved. Yahoo/AFP

Both the World Health Organization and the charity MSF are saying that the Ebola outbreak is far worse then previously claimed. Yahoo/AFP. The WHO claims that the reported statistics vastly underestimate the actual number of cases. The MSF reports that the disease is moving faster then they can respond to it and that the outbreak is like a warzone for doctors. Meanwhile, experimental drugs and vaccines are being shipped to the area. An untested Canadian vaccine called VSV-EBOV is being sent along with all remaining doses of the ZMapp experimental drug. The outbreak has had a massive impact on the economy of the African nations effected and the medical systems in those states are unable to handle the disease.

My Comment:

I mentioned in my last Ebola post that there could be many cases of the disease being unreported, and it looks like that is the case. The fact of the manner is that these countries medical systems aren't even adequate to deal with all the normal diseases that occur in Africa, let alone an outbreak of this scale. They simply can not handle this and they need all the help the can get. Will these experimental drugs and vaccines help? We have no way to know. They are completely untested on humans and the fact that they are being handed out at all shows how dire this situation is. I don't think we are being lied to about the number of victims, it's just that everything is so dysfunctional now that we can't know the impact yet.  

For Sierra Leon, Liberia and Guinea, things are out of control, but there may still be hope for Nigeria. The outbreak there appears to be limited. But should the disease start to spread in Lagos, Nigeria's capital and the largest city in Africa, it will be almost impossible to contain the spread of the disease baring a complete travel ban. And that's assuming that the Nigerian government was capable of fighting the disease in the first place. They have a shoddy medical system too and they are fighting Boko Haram as well. I still say that the disease doesn't have much of a chance in first world countries but at the rate this disease is spreading, the third world might be in serious trouble here.