From AFP via Yahoo News

The World Health Organization warned Monday that Liberia is set to see a huge spike in infections from the Ebola epidemic ravaging west Africa, with thousands of new cases imminent.

The UN agency said the country, worst-hit in the outbreak with almost 1,100 deaths, faced “many thousands” of new infections in the next three weeks.

“WHO and its director-general will continue to advocate for more Ebola treatment beds in Liberia and elsewhere, and will hold the world accountable for responding to this dire emergency with its unprecedented dimensions of human suffering,” it said in a statement.

The deadliest Ebola epidemic the world has ever seen is spreading across west Africa, with Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone the worst affected.

The death toll has topped 2,000, out of nearly 4,000 people infected.

Key development partners trying to help Liberia respond to the outbreak “need to prepare to scale up their current efforts by three- to four-fold,” the WHO said.

The countries bearing the brunt of the epidemic are among the world’s poorest, with dilapidated medical infrastructures buckling under the strain.

Before the outbreak, Liberia had only one doctor to treat every 100,000 patients in a total population of 4.4 million people.

Now that 152 healthcare workers in the country have been infected and 79 have died, the WHO said the ratio had worsened significantly.

“Every infection or death of a doctor or nurse depletes response capacity significantly,” it said.

The WHO said on Monday that one of its doctors in Sierra Leone had contracted the disease and would be evacuated.

The doctor, whose nationality was not given, is the second WHO staffer to be infected in the country. They were working at the Ebola treatment centre in Kenema, whose head doctor — and the country’s only virologist — died from the virus in July.

Read more at Yahoo News