GENEVA, Dec. 25 (Xinhua) -- The international community should continue to help West African countries fight the Ebola outbreak and build a resilient health system against future crises, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.
"Everyone has to continue their work. Countries who are helping WHO, UN Mission on Ebola response and other partners should continue to provide their support so really those countries can receive the assistance they need," Tarik Jasarevic told Xinhua in a recent interview.
The WHO's latest update showed that the global death toll from Ebola has risen to 7,588 out of 19,497 confirmed cases, with Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea the hardest-hit.
Asked why the outbreak has been particularly severe this time, Jasarevic said this is the first time those three countries are facing Ebola.
"They do not know the virus and they have not experienced the Ebola outbreak previously, so a lot of health workers, and health systems as a whole were not prepared for this outbreak," he said.
"And this is why many health workers were infected at the beginning, and this is why the virus has been able to spread geographically," he added.
Besides, Jasarevic said the health systems in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, which have just emerged from years of civil war, are "very weak".
"These three countries have some health indicators that are not really comparable to some other African countries ... All that led to the spread of the virus beyond the first initial villages in Guinea," he said.
According to the WHO, the index case triggering the Ebola outbreak was a young boy who died in Guinea on Dec. 28, 2013. From that single case, the virus spread, undetected, for more than three months, in multiple chains of transmission involving urban and rural areas.
Jasarevic said that in September, the situation was critical as the number of Ebola cases was doubling every four weeks.
"Now we have managed to slow it down in many areas. We are seeing that the number of cases is not rising exponentially anymore," he added.
Yet, he said, as there are not enough measures being put in place, the number of newly infected people is still going up and it is difficult to predict when the outbreak will end.
"What we know by now is we do what we need to do, and this basically means having more treatment centers, so we can get more people out of communities and provide them with appropriate treatment. More safe burials are being conducted, so we need more teams appropriately trained and equipped," said the spokesperson.
"We now need to go after the virus and really actively look for infected people, isolating them, making sure they don't infect family members and friends," he added.
On lessons the international community can learn from the Ebola outbreak, Jasarevic said West African countries should build a strong, resilient health system that can deal quickly with any potential case and stop the transmission chain of such diseases.
He recalled a high-level meeting convened by the WHO and other partners earlier this month, which aimed to identify pragmatic solutions to ensure that health systems will be better prepared to cope with and sustain core services for future crises.
"We need to altogether look beyond the outbreak. That's why we will have a major donors meeting with people from those countries, to see how we can build systems that, if again in the future a virus like this should occur, would be better prepared to respond," he said.
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