As the global death toll from Ebola continues to rise, new questions are being raised after the virus was transmitted to someone in the United States for the first time.

The World Health Organization has now put the death toll from Ebola at over 4,030. The vast majority of those deaths are coming from the West African nations of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Passengers from the three African nations will now undergo enhanced screening at designated airports in Great Britain and the United States.

The U.N. special envoy on Ebola, Dr. David Nabarro, warned that the world might have to live with the disease forever unless almost every country is mobilized to fight it. The presidents of Sierra Leone and Liberia appeared before the IMF and World Bank last week pleading for more help.

The World Bank warned the Ebola outbreak could cost the West African economy $32 billion by the end of 2015 unless the epidemic is contained quickly. CCTV America’s Katerina Vittozzi reports from Liberia.

 

For more on the Ebola outbreak, The Heat panel was joined by John McConnell. He’s the editor of The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals. The Heat was also joined by Dr. Jose Martin-Moreno. He’s a professor of preventative medicine and public health at the University of Valencia.

The second Heat panel was joined by Alexandra Phelan. She’s an adjunct professor in Public Health Law and Ethics at Georgetown University, and is currently researching the key legal issues of infectious diseases in the face of such global health issues as pandemics and refugee mobility.

Robin Sanders also joins the Heat. She was a U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of the Congo during an Ebola outbreak in 2002-2003, and witnessed much of the work that went into combating it then. She later served as the U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria.

Liberia faces a grim task of dealing with the country’s mounting death toll. For the burial teams, it’s also a risky one.