Ebola Could be 'World's Next Aids', Warns CDC Director

Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Thursday that Ebola was spreading very fast that it may well become a global pandemic like AIDS if action was not taken to control it.

"In the 30 years I've been working public health, the only thing like this has been AIDS, and we have to work now so that this is not the world's next AIDS," Frieden said, reports ABC News.

Frieden was speaking at a conference of the World Bank in Washington. The high level conference was attended by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, Presidents of the Ebola-stricken West African nations, and representatives of governments and non-profit organizations around the world.

At the conference, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim endorsed pledges from the United States and United Nations to ensure safe evacuation of health workers  working in the affected regions.

This will ensure that sufficient number of doctors and nurses will risk their lives to help in the fight against the disease.

Elaborating further, Kim said that more hospitals and local health centers must be built quickly so that West Africans can get care from their own community.

This will also eliminate their fear that Ebola centers are places that people go to in order to die, he said, reports the Associated Press.

Meanwhile, the European Union has announced plans for a system to evacuate international staff from Ebola-infected countries if they exhibit symptoms of the disease.

The new system will allow a patient to be flown within 48 hours to European hospitals that have all facilities to deal with the disease, a statement from the European Commission said, reports BBC.

The move is expected to make the deployment of European medical workers easier to West Africa for combating the disease.