[miningmx.com] – THE Ebola virus had spread in Guinea to two new regions of which one was a village in Siguiri which is 30 kilometres from the AngloGold Ashanti mine of the same name, said Bloomberg News.
Citing Guinea officials, Bloomberg News said the further spread of the disease had complicated efforts to control it. No employees had been infected at the AngloGold mine and operations continued, said the gold producer.
The current outbreak of Ebola is the worst on record with some 4,500 lives estimated to have been lost out of some 8,914 recorded cases since the start fo the year, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the UK’s Guardian said.
In Guinea alone the death toll has risen to 887 since December, according to the country’s health ministry.
The outbreak is threatening to slow growth in West Africa and has drawn heavy criticism from aid organisation, most recently Oxfam, which has called for military intervention in West Africa in an effort to stem the spread of the disease which it believed could be the
“definitive humanitarian disaster of our generation’. It accused countries that did not commit military personnel of “costing lives’.
Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf said October 17 that the world has finally “woken up’ to the threat of Ebola and must commit the necessary resources to containment efforts.
President Barack Obama is preparing a request for extra money on top of the $1bn that the US pledged to fight Ebola, according to one White House official and a Capitol Hill official, said Bloomberg News.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), there could be as much as 10,000 cases of Ebola a week by December, assuming a worst case scenario.
