Situation Report

NEW YORK TIMES  by NORIMITSU ONISHI and SHERI FINK        March 14, 2015

MONROVIA, Liberia — West Africa’s Ebola epidemic may be waning, but another outbreak in the future is a near certainty, health officials say.

ASSOCIATED PRESS  by Clarence Roy-Macaulay                                                      March 12, 2015
 FREETOWN --   Sierra Leone has seen a worrying spike in confirmed Ebola cases over the past week in four districts, the head of the national Ebola response center said Thursday.

New measures must now be put into place to contain the surges, said the head of the National Ebola Response Centre, Alfred Palo Conteh.

Fifteen cases were recorded Wednesday, along with 16 on Monday and Tuesday respectively, according to Sierra Leone's Ministry of Health and Sanitation.

"We are now on a bumpy road to zero number of cases to get to President Ernest Bai Koroma's target of March 31," said Palo Conteh. "It is frustrating."

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AFP                                                                                                                    March 12, 2015
(Scroll down for WHO report.)

Geneva -- The global death toll from the Ebola outbreak centred in west Africa has topped 10,000 out of more than 24,000 recorded cases, the World Health Organization said Thursday.

Almost all the deaths and cases have been reported in the three west African countries worst hit by the outbreak: Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

Sierra Leone, which has overtaken Liberia as the country with the most infections, counted 11,677 cases and 3,655 deaths as of March 10.

As of March 5, Liberia -- long the hardest-hit country -- had recorded a total of 9,343 and 4,162 deaths.

But the tide seems to be turning in the country which in August and September was reporting more than 300 new cases each week, with the WHO saying Wednesday that Liberia had registered no new cases since February 19.

In Guinea, where the outbreak started in December 2013, 3,330 Ebola cases and 2,187 deaths were recorded as of March 10.

The WHO said on Wednesday that the country had seen no new cases in the previous 10 days.

REUTERS  by Misha Hussain                                                    March 12, 2015sC

(Scroll down for links to press release and full report.)

DAKAR -- West Africa may lose up to $15 billion over the next three years due to the impact of the Ebola outbreak on trade, investment and tourism, according to a report by the United Nations.

The world's deadliest Ebola epidemic has killed almost 10,000 people in the three most affected countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, deepening poverty in one of the least developed parts of the world.

"The consequences of Ebola are vast," said Abdoulaye Mar Dieye, Africa director of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

"Stigma and risk aversion have caused considerable amounts of damage, shutting down borders and indirectly affecting the economies of a large number of countries in the sub-region."

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