Ebola causing collateral damage especially in countries hardest hit

"People are massively dying from other diseases that are normally treatable, like malaria, or women die while giving birth because hospitals are abandoned or are full with Ebola patients. So that's a very, very destabilizing factor," he said, adding that the impact of its spread is "beyond Ebola," Peter Piot, a microbiologist and a former undersecretary general of the United Nations, "And I continue to be worried that the response to the epidemic is really running behind the virus."

Although the Ebola fear appears to be more infectious than the disease itself, the collateral damage from the deadly virus is also having a concerning impact. In the example of Texas Health Presbyterian in Dallas TX, the cluster of three Ebola cases linked to one hospital has caused people to justifiably avoid using this facility. Ambulance diversions are already implemented putting a burden on other hospitals to take up the load. Now, airlines and the stock market are reacting because consumers are cautious about where the Ebola virus may erupt, impacting travel related business, In other words, a treatment for Ebola must be found very soon!

Peter Piot, a member of the team that discovered the virus in 1976 in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, said he feared an "unimaginable catastrophe" if the virus became lodged in a mega-city such as Lagos, Nigeria.

"The three countries that are affected are being totally destabilized, not only in terms of people who are killed by Ebola -- their families, the orphans that now are coming up because the parents died -- but the economy has come to a standstill," Piot said Thursday, speaking from Oxford, England.

"People are massively dying from other diseases that are normally treatable, like malaria, or women die while giving birth because hospitals are abandoned or are full with Ebola patients. So that's a very, very destabilizing factor," he said, adding that the impact of its spread is "beyond Ebola."

Piot said that it is impossible to predict the number of cases. Asked about the WHO projections, he said: "10,000 per week, or 1,000, we don't really know."

At the moment, there are about 1,000," he said. "It's still expanding, that's for sure. And it probably will continue to grow until all the measures have been put in place in a more efficient way."

Piot's comments came on the same day as Daniel Varga, the chief clinical officer for Texas Health Services, apologized over mistakes he says were made in the care of Thomas Duncan, a Liberian national who became the first person in the United States to die from the virus. Duncan was sent home despite saying he had a fever and that he had visited West Africa.

"Unfortunately, in our initial treatment of Mr. Duncan, despite our best intentions and a highly skilled medical team, we made mistakes," Varga testified to Congress. "We did not correctly diagnose his symptoms as those of Ebola. We are deeply sorry."

Writing for CNN earlier this month, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief Tom Frieden said one way for the United States to prevent the disease spreading in the United States is to tackle it at the source, in West Africa.

"After all is said and done here, that is the only way to truly and completely protect the health security of America -- and the world," Frieden wrote.

Beyond the impact of the Ebola virus itself, with an apparent 50 percent mortality rate among those who are infected, the collateral damage from affected health and business systems has yet to be fully realized.