UN agency says fatality rate at 70% and that ‘a lot more people will die’ unless world steps up its response to crisis

The Ebola outbreak could grow to 10,000 new cases a week within two months, the World Health Organisation warned on Tuesday as the death toll from the virus reached 4,447 people, nearly all of them in west Africa.

Dr Bruce Aylward, the WHO assistant director-general, told a news conference in Geneva that the number of new cases was likely to be between 5,000 and 10,000 a week by early December.

WHO’s regular updates show that deaths have resulted from 4,447 of the 8,914 reported cases, but Aylward said that any assumption that the death rate was 50% would be wrong. He put the death rate at 70% because many deaths are not reported or recorded officially.

Where detailed investigations have been carried out, it was clear that only 30% of people were surviving, he said, adding that the figure was almost exactly the same in the three hardest hit countries, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. “This is a high-mortality disease in any circumstances but particularly in these places,” said Aylward.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dr Bruce Aylward says it is not WHO’s job to judge how different countries respond to the Ebola outbreak

The grim forecast came as the first returning passengers from west Africa to Heathrow airport were asked to undergo temperature checks and questionnaires about their contacts with Ebola patients. The £9m screening exercise has been criticised by some experts, who say it will not pick up those who have the virus but are not yet symptomatic.

In the US, it emerged that a nurse who contracted Ebola has been given a blood transfusion from Dr Kent Brantly, who has recovered from the disease. The nurse, Nina Pham, was infected while caring for Thomas Duncan, who was taken ill on a visit from Liberia and died in Texas Health Presbyterian hospital, Dallas.

Brantly has donated blood for three Ebola patients, including Pham. “He’s a doctor. That’s what he’s there to do. That’s his heart,” said Jeremy Blume, a spokesman for the non-profit medical mission group Samaritan’s Purse, which Brantly was working for in Liberia. The WHO said plasma from people who had overcome Ebola, which contains antibodies against the virus, should be tried as a treatment, but it is hard to use outside the sophisticated healthcare settings of the west.

US president Barack Obama said on Tuesday night that the “world is not doing enough” to combat the disease, and that “everybody’s going to have to do more than they are doing right now”. Obama said he wants to make sure lessons learned from Pham’s case are applied to health centres around the US.

The UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response, newly set up to coordinate the fight against the disease, has set targets to isolate 70% of suspected cases in west Africa and safely bury 70% of the dead within the next 60 days – described as the 70-70-60 plan.

It is a tough target, said Aylward, but if it takes 90 days rather than 60, “a lot more people will die who shouldn’t and we will need that much more capacity on the ground to manage the caseload”.

As the numbers continue to rise, the need for beds and health personnel to treat the sick will increase – and there is a serious shortage of trained and experienced people to lead the effort, according to Aylward.

Good training programmes are being put in place, particularly by the UK and the US, “but there is still the challenge of getting internationals on the ground who have expertise – in Ebola ideally”.

For the past four weeks, about 1,000 new infections a week – including suspected, confirmed and probable cases – have come to light. Aylward said the WHO was concerned about the continued spread, especially in the capital cities of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia – Freetown, Conakry and Monrovia.

“The virus is still moving geographically and escalating in the capitals,” he said. Large treatment centres are taking a long time to build and staff and those that exist are full. A new strategy, which the UK is supporting in Sierra Leone, is to set up a lot of community care units with a handful of beds, where people can stay and get basic care rather than endangering their families at home, while waiting for a treatment centre bed. The units will also help people arriving with fever because they have malaria. At the moment, they are not being treated or are afraid to go to hospital.

In Berlin, a UN medical worker infected with Ebola in Liberia has died despite “intensive medical procedures”.

The St Georg hospital in Leipzig said on Tuesday that the 56-year-old man, whose name has not been released, died overnight of the infection. The man tested positive for Ebola on 6 October, prompting Liberia’s UN peacekeeping mission to place 41 other staff members under close medical observation.

He arrived in Leipzig for treatment on 9 October. The hospital’s chief executive, Dr Iris Minde, said at the time there was no risk of infection for other people because he was kept in a secure isolation ward specially equipped with negative pressure, hermetically sealed rooms.

He was the third Ebola patient to be flown to Germany for treatment. The first man recovered and returned home to Senegal. A Uganda aid worker is still being treated in Frankfurt.

A team of 750 military personnel setting off from Cornwall to help tackle Ebola in Sierra Leone in the Royal Navy hospital ship Argus will be banned from shore leave during its three-month deployment and medical staff will take their temperature twice a day, according to its captain, David Eagles.Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are donating $25m (£16m) to the CDC Foundation to help address the Ebola epidemic.