Ebola outbreak compared to wartime by Doctors Without Borders

The Ebola epidemic is like a frontline that is constantly advancing, the head of Doctors Without Borders said Friday.

Joanne Liu, international president of Doctors Without Borders, spoke to reporters in Geneva after spending 10 days on the ground in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, the three countries most affected by the outbreak. She said it felt like a war in which the frontline is 'moving, it's advancing.'

'We have no clue how it's going to go around,' Liu said.

On Thursday, the World Health Organization said that official counts, which stand at 1,069 deaths and 1,975 cases, may still 'vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak.'

Liu called the lack of infrastructure in the West African countries struggling to contain the epidemic an 'emergency within the emergency' because people don't have access to basic health care, which creates distrust.

'My biggest concern is that we are exposing the medical staff over and over again,' she said.

Beds in Ebola treatment centres are filling up faster than they can be provided, evidence that an outbreak in West Africa is far more severe than the numbers show, an official with the World Health Organization said Friday.

The flood of patients into every newly opened treatment centre is evidence that the numbers aren't keeping up, Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the UN health agency, said from Geneva.

'My biggest concern is that we are exposing the medical staff over and over again.' - Joanne Liu, Doctors Without Borders

Hartl said that an 80-bed treatment centre opened in Liberia's capital in recent days filled up immediately. The next day, dozens more people showed up to be treated.

Ebola can cause a high fever, bleeding and vomiting. Since there is no cure and no licensed treatment, doctors and nurses focus on providing supportive care, such as maintaining patients' blood pressure.

With files from Associated Press

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