GENEVA The African Development Bank will prepare an additional $150 million in funding for nations stricken by the Ebola virus as the World Health Organization plans to seek more resources and money to fight the outbreak.
The worst-affected countries may see 1 percentage point to 1.5 percentage points shaved off economic growth because of the disease, the bank’s president, Donald Kaberuka, told reporters Tuesday in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The money will be distributed in loans and grants to bolster epidemic preparedness and response, the WHO said. The bank previously pledged $60 million to help the countries fight Ebola.
More than $430 million will be needed to bring the worst Ebola outbreak on record under control, according to a draft document laying out the WHO’s battle strategy. The sum now being sought is six times more than the $71 million the WHO suggested was needed in a plan published less than a month ago.
“The response at the beginning wasn’t robust enough,” David Heymann, a professor of infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who worked on the first recorded Ebola outbreak in 1976. “It’s a step forward that they’ve made the plans and I’m glad they’re emphasizing rapid containment as a start.”
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Ebola has killed 1,427 people in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria since December. The WHO plan sets a goal of reversing the trend in new cases within two months, and stopping all transmission in six to nine months. It requires funding by governments, development banks, the private sector and in-kind contributions, according to the document obtained by Bloomberg News.
More than half the cost will be needed for the treatment, isolation and referral centers that are bearing the brunt of the epidemic, according to the WHO plan. Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone are among the world’s poorest countries, and weak medical systems combined with a lack of experienced health-care workers has contributed to the epidemic, the WHO has said.
“Clearly a massively scaled and coordinated international response is needed to support affected and at-risk countries,” according to the draft of the WHO’s so-called road map.
The Geneva-based health agency plans to publish the plan by the end of this week at the earliest and details may change, said Fadela Chaib, a WHO spokeswoman. The document has been shared with the WHO’s partners for comment and will be published once their feedback has been received, Chaib said. The final document will include a country-by-country plan for dealing with the outbreak, she said.
There is reason to be concerned “about whether the proposed resources would be adequate,” said Barry Bloom, a public health professor at Harvard University who also questioned whether the funds would be made available fast enough, and whether the organization’s latest plan “would ensure the expertise from WHO that is needed.”
The scale of the disease’s devastation goes far beyond what health officials had seen previously, J. Stephen Morrison, director of the global health policy center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in a telephone interview.
It’s not “a question of incompetence or complacency,” according to Morrison, who said the WHO should be able to raise the money needed. “It’s the fact we’re catching up with the unknown, and it’s way ahead of us.”
The WHO this month declared Ebola in West Africa a public health emergency of international concern. A separate outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed as many as 13 people, the government in that country said Monday.
In West Africa, more than 240 health care workers have been infected and 120 have died, the agency said in a statement Monday. Among them is Abraham Borbor, the deputy chief medical officer of Liberia’s John F. Kennedy Medical Center, who died despite being treated with Mapp Biopharmaceutical’s experimental ZMapp medicine, the nation’s information minister said.
Borbor was one of three Liberian health-care workers being treated with ZMapp, the same drug that was used on two American aid workers who were evacuated to the U.S. after being infected in Liberia. Closely held Mapp, based in San Diego, has said its supply of the drug is exhausted.
A British health worker, William Pooley, was flown home for treatment at London’s Royal Free hospital after being infected in Sierra Leone, Public Health England said in a statement Monday.
Pooley is receiving “excellent care,” his family said in a statement on the hospital’s website, as it asked “everyone to remember those in other parts of the world suffering with Ebola who do not have access to the same health-care facilities as Will.”
A Senegalese disease-tracker working with the WHO in Sierra Leone also became infected, making him the first of the agency’s 400 workers in the affected countries to fall ill with the deadly virus, the WHO said.
from The better Thingshttp://thebetter-things.blogspot.com/2014/08/ebola-fight-gets-150-million-from-bank.html
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