GENEVA: The Ebola outbreak in West Africa eventually could exceed 20,000 cases, more than six times as many as are known now, the World Health Organisation said on Thursday as the United States announced plans to test an experimental Ebola vaccine.

Currently, about half of the people infected with Ebola have died, so in a worst-case scenario the death toll could reach 10,000, the agency said.

The UN agency’s latest figures show that 1,552 people have died from the virus from among the 3,069 cases reported so far in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria.

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However, it said the actual number of cases in many hard-hit areas may be two to four times higher than that. That suggests there could be up to 12,000 cases already.

“This far outstrips any historic Ebola outbreak in numbers. The largest outbreak in the past was about 400 cases,” Dr Bruce Aylward, WHO’s assistant director-general for emergency operations, told reporters.

More than 40 per cent of the cases have been identified in the last three weeks, the UN health agency said, adding that “the outbreak continues to accelerate.” Aylward said the agency does not necessarily expect 20,000 cases, but a system must be put into place to handle such a massive increase in case numbers.

The US National Institutes of Health, meanwhile, announced it will start testing an experimental Ebola vaccine in humans next week. The vaccine was developed by the US government and GlaxoSmithKline and the preliminary trial will test the shot in healthy US adults in Maryland.

Published in Dawn, August 29th, 2014