Written by Belinda Goldsmith | From Reuters Africa

The Ebola crisis in West Africa that claimed its first victim exactly a year ago is likely to last until the end of 2015, according to a scientist who helped to discover the virus.

Two-year-old Emile Ouamouno died in the remote village of Meliandou in southern Guinea on Dec. 28 last year after suffering from a fever, headache and diarrhoea. His 3-year-old sister, mother and grandmother died days later.

These deaths went unnoticed and the disease smouldered undetected, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). It was not until March that health officials in Guinea started to realise something worrisome was happening.

Ebola had never struck in West Africa and it took a while to recognise the start of what has become the world’s worst outbreak of the virus that has killed more than 7,500 people and infected nearly 19,500 in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

By August, the WHO declared the epidemic to be a “public health emergency of international concern”.

Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and part of a team to discover Ebola in 1976, said progress was being made in trying to stop the virus spreading but it would take time to develop vaccines.

Read more at Reuters Africa