‘Thousands’ of Ebola deaths likely unreported: WHO expert

Geneva: The raging Ebola outbreak has likely killed far more people than the 4,818 deaths reported by the World Health Organisation, an expert at the UN health agency said today, warning that thousands of fatalities were likely not accounted for.
Dye said the likely explanation was that many people were burying the dead in secret, possibly to avoid having authorities interfere with burial customs like washing and touching the deceased widely blamed for much of the transmission.

The UN’s health agency has created confusion with its latest figures of Ebola cases and deaths, which have shown shrinking numbers. The toll provided Wednesday night showed 4,818 deaths, down from 4,951 reported on October 31, while the number of reported cases fell to 13,042 from 13,567.

“Many, many people are still dying of Ebola,” he said. Up until recently, WHO had used several different databases from each of the affected countries to calculate the overall number of cases and deaths.

The different sources however meant that the numbers did not always progress in a consistent manner, fluctuating according to what data was available from the separate databases.

To avoid the fluctuations, the agency had shifted to only using data from each of the countries’ situation reports, based on daily counts of patients and deaths district by district.