Entire villages wiped out by Ebola in Sierra Leone. Situation is "catastrophic". -Yahoo/AFP

A burial detail in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Yahoo/AFP

Rony Zachariah of the medical charity Doctors Without Borders says the situation in Sierra Leone is "catastrophic". -Yahoo/AFP. Entire villages have been wiped out by Ebola and the actual numbers of deaths far outnumber the reported 5,000 global death toll. Zachariah estimates that as many as 20,000 have died already, in line with WHO estimates. In one village Zachariah visited 39 out of the total population of 40 people had died. Many of these cases have not been counted. He also says that the health care system is collapsing under the weight of all the Ebola cases and deaths. 

My Comment:

As America is freaking out about a single case in New York and the defiant (and incredibly annoying) nurse in Maine, West Africa is dying. I've known for a long time that the number of deaths and cases was far larger then the official numbers, so that at least isn't news. The fact that entire villages are being wiped out by the virus is not something I have heard before but it is something that I have long suspected. If nothing changes, at the very least the countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guiana will suffer the same fate of these isolated villages. With no international intervention or vaccine the entire region could be depopulated. 

I'm trying to figure out how that one person managed to survive when everyone else died. Did he or she get sick and get better? Did he or she never get infected? Did he or she have some kind of natural immunity? I can't imagine being in that situation, even though I have pondered it before. Long ago another virus wiped out entire villages. It was called the Spanish Flu and it killed 3 to 5% of the entire worlds population, which, at the time, was 50 to 100 million people. I don't think Ebola will have that much of a global impact but locally it already has. 

Is there any hope? For the rest of the world, yes. They are working hard on a vaccine and if one or two become available then we may be able to fight back against the virus. It's already too late for West Africa. If there isn't a major reduction in the rate of new cases then West Africa will lose tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, before the vaccine becomes widely available. And of course there will be secondary deaths from starvation, civil unrest and other treatable diseases that will be ignored and untreated. Even with a massive international response and an effective vaccine the casualties could very easily reach six or even seven figures. 

I have heard reports that Liberia is seeing fewer cases lately. How true those reports are is unclear to me. I also heard reports that many people in Liberia are not seeking treatment because of their policy to cremate all dead bodies, unlike Sierra Leone and Guiana, who have no such policy. That could be the cause in the dip of new cases. It could also be that they just haven't been able to do the legwork to find the same empty villages like they have found in Sierra Leone. If it is true though it is the first sign of hope in any of the worst effected countries. Hope has been in short supply for far too long.