14 DAY TRIAL // If you've been paying attention to the news, you probably know that the Ebola epidemic in West Africa is yet to be put on a tight leash.
Thousands of people have already been killed by the Ebola virus, and by the looks of it, things are about to go from bad to worse.
Thus, specialists with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US say that, under a business-as-usual scenario, the virus could come to infect a whopping 1.4 million people by the end of January 2015.
Since this virus has a documented fatality rate of 90%, this means that the ongoing epidemic in West Africa stands to make hundreds of thousands of victims over the course of just a few months, Science Daily informs.
“If the disease keeps spreading as it has been we estimate there could be hundreds of thousands of cases by the end of the year in Liberia alone,” computational epidemiologist Ryan Lewis said in a statement.
Researchers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stress that, although drugs and vaccines can help contain the epidemic, supportive care and keeping health workers safe are the aspects authorities need to focus on.
For those unaware, his Ebola outbreak debuted back in December 2013 in Guinea. Thousands of people have until now been infected, and the World Health organization considers it to be the largest event of this kind thus far documented.
Things in West Africa are so bad that, earlier this month, US President Barack Obama announced that the county would send 3,000 troops to the affected regions and would also invest $750 million (€579 million) in efforts to halt the spread of this disease.