The world's attention may have shifted to U.S. airstrikes on Syria, but West Africa continues to be ravaged by the worst outbreak of Ebola. The World Health Organization (WHO) is still investigating 20 to 30 possible cases daily and has declared the epidemic a "public health emergency of international concern".
Here's a look at the latest developments in the battle against the virus—one of the most virulent known to man:
On Tuesday, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned that between 550,000 and 1.4 million people in West Africa could be infected with Ebola by January 20, 2015, according to Reuters.
Also on Tuesday, the WHO warned that if the epidemic continued to progress at its current rate, the number of cases could exceed 20,000 by the start of November, with 5,740 sufferers in Guinea, 9,890 in Liberia, and 5,000 in Sierra Leone—equivalent to thousands of cases and deaths each week.
"For the medium term, at least, we must therefore face the possibility that Ebola virus disease will become endemic among the human population of West Africa, a prospect that has never previously been contemplated," said the WHO's Ebola response team in an article published online by the New England Journal of Medicine on Tuesday.