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GENEVA / EBOLA UPDATE
STORY: GENEVA / EBOLA UPDATE
TRT: 1.56
SOURCE: WHO
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS
DATELINE: 29 OCTOBER 2014, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
1. Wide shot, press conference table
2. Close up, photographer
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Bruce Aylward, WHO Assistant Director-General in Charge of the Operational Response:
“The real goal in this first sixty days is to try and get the heat out of the epidemic in as many places as possible so that you can have enough manpower then on the ground, enough beds on the ground, to be able to ensure that classic epidemiologic approach of contact tracing, case finding, is in place.”
4. Med shot, journalists
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Bruce Aylward, WHO Assistant Director-General in Charge of the Operational Response:
“With the concerted community engagement, with safe burials, with a big push on getting the right information out through the right channels, you can rapidly get the behaviour changes that are critical to protecting populations and helping them protect themselves and that can translate into positive trends in terms of the disease.”
6. Med shot, journalists
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Bruce Aylward, WHO Assistant Director-General in Charge of the Operational Response:
“Our goal here, or the goal of everyone involved in Ebola, is to reduce the number of contacts of any positive Ebola case has and an awful lot of that can be done with simple behaviour changes.”
8. Med shot, cameras
9. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Bruce Aylward, WHO Assistant Director-General in Charge of the Operational Response:
“There has been a huge effort to inform the population about the disease, to change the behaviours that put them at risk of the disease, and probably most noticeably there was real step up in the work to put in place safe burials very, very quickly.”
10. Tilt up, from laptop computer to press conference participants
11. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Bruce Aylward, WHO Assistant Director-General in Charge of the Operational Response:
“The danger now is that we move, instead of a steady downward trend that gets us down to zero, that we end up with a oscillating pattern where the disease starts going up and down and areas start getting re-infected, so, again, what gets the heat out of thing and slows it down isn’t necessarily what is going to get us to zero.”
12. Wide shot, press conference table
The spread of Ebola in Liberia may be slowing, as demonstrated in the decline in burials and sickbed occupancy rates, as well as a plateau in lab-reported new cases in the West African country hardest hit by the virus, the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) reported today, while cautioning against drawing premature conclusions.
Dr. Bruce Aylward, WHO Assistant Director-General in charge of operational response, told a press conference from the agency’s Geneva headquarters that “the real goal in this first sixty days is to try and get the heat out of the epidemic in as many places as possible so that you can have enough manpower then on the ground, enough beds on the ground, to be able to ensure that classic epidemiologic approach of contact tracing, case finding, is in place.”
The WHO doctor said there was evidence that Ebola-affected countries can control the epidemic with safe burial, education, engagement, treatment work at a large scale.
Aylward said that “with the concerted community engagement, with safe burials, with a big push on getting the right information out through the right channels, you can rapidly get the behaviour changes that are critical to protecting populations and helping them protect themselves and that can translate into positive trends in terms of the disease.”
The goal, he said, was “to reduce the number of contacts of any positive Ebola case has and an awful lot of that can be done with simple behaviour changes.”
He said “there has been a huge effort to inform the population about the disease, to change the behaviours that put them at risk of the disease, and probably most noticeably there was real step up in the work to put in place safe burials very, very quickly.”
Aylward urged caution in interpreting the recent data saying that conclusions should not be drawn that Ebola is under control in Liberia.
“The danger” he said “is that we move, instead of a steady downward trend that gets us down to zero, that we end up with a oscillating pattern where the disease starts going up and down and areas start getting re-infected, so, again, what gets the heat out of thing and slows it down isn’t necessarily what is going to get us to zero.”
While he reported the freeing up of hospital beds, the plateauing of laboratory-confirmed cases and a decline in burials in Liberia, he noted that Ebola infections are still very high in parts of Sierra Leone, another country at the frontlines of the outbreak, along with Guinea.
He said the latest Ebola statistics to be released from WHO later today are expected to show the total number of cases in West Africa climbed to more than 13,000 and the death toll to more than 5,000. He explained the spike in the caseload was attributable to some old cases being reported late amidst the unprecedented Ebola epidemic.
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