ABUJA, Nigeria -- The World Health Organization says the death toll from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has risen to 932.
The new figures come Wednesday as authorities in Nigeria confirmed the death of a nurse of Ebola. Saudi Arabia also announced one death of a person with Ebola-like symptoms.
The outbreak emerged in March in Guinea and shows no sign of slowing down. Most of the new deaths are coming from Liberia and Sierra Leone.
There now have been 363 deaths in Guinea, 282 in Liberia, 286 in Sierra Leone and one confirmed death in Nigeria, according to WHO's statistics as of Aug. 4.
The growing number of cases in Lagos, a megacity of some 21 million people, comes as authorities acknowledge they did not treat Patrick Sawyer as an Ebola patient and isolate him for the first 24 hours after his arrival in Nigeria last month. Sawyer, a 40-year-old American of Liberian descent with a wife and three young daughters in Minnesota, was traveling on a business flight to Nigeria when he fell ill.
The death of the unidentified nurse marks the second Ebola death in Nigeria, and is a very worrisome development since it is the Africa's most populous country and Lagos, where the deaths occurred, one of its biggest cities.
The specter of the virus spreading through Nigeria is particularly alarming, said David Morse, an epidemiology professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
'It makes you nervous when so many people are potentially at risk,' he said.
Lagos is a bewildering combination of wealth and abject poverty, awash in luxury SUVs and decrepit buses alike that carry passengers through hours of crowded traffic on the bridges linking the city's islands to the mainland.
Ebola can only be transmitted through direct contact with the bodily fluids of someone who is sick - blood, semen, saliva, urine, feces or sweat. Millions live in cramped conditions without access to flushable toilets, and signs posted across the megacity tell people not to urinate in public.
Ebola, which has a mortality rate between 60 and 96 percent, is a systemic virus, meaning it impacts all organs that control various functions in the body. But before it attacks the gastrointestinal, respiratory, vascular, muscular, neurological and immune systems, Ebola starts off looking a lot like the flu.
At its onset, a patient may experience fatigue, fever, headache, sore throat and pain in the joints and muscles. The initial symptoms are so common that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says cases are often misdiagnosed.
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