Sep 28, 2014 09:53 PM EDT By J Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

New Ebola cases could reach more than 1.4 million by the end of January 2015, according to a recent study.

According to a statistical forecast released this week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the epidemic could claim hundreds of thousands of lives and infect more than 1.4 million people by January.

The forecast  supports the drastically higher projections released earlier by a group of scientists, including epidemiologists with the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, who modeled the Ebola spread as part of a National Institutes of Health-sponsored project called Midas, short for Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study.

Before the scientists released results, the outbreak in West Africa was expected to be under control in nine months with only about 20,000 total cases. But modeling showed 20,000 people could be infected in just a single month.

"If the disease keeps spreading as it has been we estimate there could be hundreds of thousands of cases by the end of the year in Liberia alone," Bryan Lewis, a computational epidemiologist with the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, said in a statement.

The predictions could change dramatically if public health efforts become effective, but based on the virus's current uncontrolled spread, numbers of people infected could skyrocket.

The agent-based models are adaptive, evolving as more information is fed into them to provide an accurate forecast. Pharmaceutical intervention, which is still on the horizon, is proving less effective in the models than supportive care and personal protection equipment for health care workers.     

Pharmaceutical intervention, which is still on the horizon, is proving less effective in the models than supportive care and personal protection equipment for health care workers.

"The work with Ebola is not an isolated event," said Christopher Barrett, the executive director of the institute. "This research is part of a decades-long effort largely funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to build a global synthetic population that will allow us to ask questions about our world and ourselves that we have never been able to ask before, and to use those answers to prevent or quickly intervene during a crisis."

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