The UN World Health Organization (WHO) says more than 1,900 people have died in the West Africa Ebola Outbreak, out of 3,500 confirmed or probable infections.  WHO leader Dr. Margaret Chan says the outbreak is “the largest and most severe and most complex we have ever seen”.

“No one, even outbreak responders with experience dating back to 1976, to 1995, people that were directly involved with those outbreaks, none of them have ever seen anything like it,” Chan said.  The WHO says it will cost at least US$600 Million to fight the outbreak, and is asking larger nations to pony up.

40 percent of all infections have occurred in the last few weeks, showing how the pace of the infections have accelerated in teeming cities.  The outbreak began in Guinea and spread to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, and Senegal.

But it’s the new cluster of infections in southern Nigeria that’s causing concern.  Ebola came into the country via an infected Liberian-American businessman who flew to Lagos.  Nigerian officials thought they had contained it there.  But one of the doctors who treated Ebola patients in Lagos fled hundreds of kilometers away to the southern oil city of Port Harcourt (metro area population approximately two million).  He continued to treat patients at his private clinic, operating on at least two, and socialized with family and friends.  But that doctor died on 22 August, and five days after that tests confirmed he had Ebola.

The dead doctor’s wife has the hemorrhagic fever, as does another patient in the same hospital.  Authorities are monitoring some 200 people in Port Harcourt for symptoms of Ebola.