The United Nations children’s agency is warning that the deadly Ebola virus has spread to the capital of the West African nation of Guinea.  It’s already killed at least 59 out of 80 infected people in this outbreak, in a nation where it’s never been detected before. There is no cure or vaccine for Ebola disease.

“We see that a lot of people that died, they were all linked, meaning they have been in contact with each other,” said Dr. Esther Sterk of the group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders.  “That is very typical for ebola outbreaks.  We see that there is a transmission chain in families.”

The disease seems to have started in the south, hundreds of kilometers away from Guinea’s capital of Conakry, a sprawling port city of two million people.  Ebola disease is a hemorrhagic fever which kills as patients’ organs and membranes bleed out.  It’s spread from person to person via bodily fluids.

MSF is bolstering its team in Guinea and flying some 33 tons of drugs and isolation equipment in from Belgium and France.  Health workers will have to quickly identify all patients with the disease and monitor anyone they had been in contact with during their illness.

“The more quickly we can contain this the fewer cases we'll have, then the smaller the scale of the epidemic,” said MSF’s Dr. Armand Sprecher.  “That's the idea of going in as strong as we can early on.”