W.H.O. Reports Ebola Still Spreading in West Africa [white media ignores ebola now because it is not affecting white people]

From [HERE] The Ebola virus is still spreading in West Africa, especially in Sierra Leone, and the worldwide toll from the outbreak stood at 7,905 deaths among 20,206 known cases at year’s end, the World Health Organization said Wednesday. Sierra Leone reported 337 new cases in the past week, including 149 in Freetown, the highest incidence in the capital of the former British colony in four weeks, the W.H.O. said in its latest weekly update. However, the number of cases in Sierra Leone over a three-week period has fallen below 1,000 for the first time since Sept. 28, suggesting the spread of the disease is slowing. In neighboring Guinea, the three-week total rose for a second week to 346, suggesting the epidemic is growing there.

All across the most affected nations — Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia — Ebola continues to lay waste not just to immune systems but also to balance sheets. Tourism, agriculture, road construction, arts and crafts, diesel sales, tax collections, and just about every other slice of the economy, legal or not, are significantly down, costing billions of dollars in lost business and spelling years of increased hardship for an already impoverished region.

Freetown does not have a single working traffic signal, and now legions of the unemployed and youths out of school thicken the streets while foreign tourists stay far away.

Ebola’s nasty reputation as a contagious disease that can slither across borders and make people bleed from their eyeballs has become so oversized and onerous that it has managed to dent tourism across the entire continent.

More than any loss of life or manpower, it is the extreme efforts to check the disease that are proving far more costly to the economies. Shutting schools, quarantining whole districts, sealing borders, canceling flights and banning public gatherings may have helped reduce transmission of the disease, but such measures have crippled trade. The shame of it is that Sierra Leone was growing at an impressive clip — before Ebola hit.

“A shock like this just brings a whole bunch of households back below the poverty line,” said David Evans, a World Bank economist. “It’s a huge setback.”

It is not clear how quickly Liberia, Guinea or Sierra Leone would bounce back even if the virus were stopped in its tracks right now. The World Bank predicts that Sierra Leone’s economy will contract in 2015 and that West Africa will lose at least $3.8 billion in economic activity. Farming is one of the biggest concerns. In some areas of Sierra Leone, agricultural production has dropped by nearly half because so many cassava and rice farmers were ordered to stay home for mandatory quarantines. [MORE]