DAKAR: More than 16,000 people have been infected with Ebola and nearly 7,000 have died, according to the latest figures from the World Health Organisation.

The new death toll, released late on Friday by the UN agency, represents an increase of more than 1,000 deaths since a report from two days before. Most of the new deaths were recorded in Liberia, but the new toll likely includes deaths that have gone unreported over a significant period of time.

Data from the outbreak has been spotty and slow to come and often death and case tolls see large jumps when backlogs of information are cleared. Because the data is so hard to come by, the World Health Organisation has cautioned that its figures may significantly underreport the actual number of people sickened and killed by the disease.

The current outbreak began in West Africa and has been severely hitting three countries there: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Friday’s data showed there have been 16,169 cases in just those three countries — an increase of 268 cases since a report two days earlier.

Published in Dawn, November 30th , 2014