The Ebola outbreak is the biggest global health challenge since the emergence of AIDS, a top US health official said Thursday at a World Bank conference convened to shore up international aid to fight the disease.
“In the 30 years I’ve been working in public health, the only thing like this has been AIDS,” said Thomas Frieden, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“We have to work now so that this is not the next AIDS,” he said in reference to repeated calls by advocacy groups for the international community to speed up efforts to contain the virus in West Africa.
So far, donor countries have funded less than a third of the 988 million dollars that the United Nations has appealed for to fight Ebola and stabilize the affected countries.
“We were tested by Ebola and we failed. We failed miserably in our response,” World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said in an interview with the British daily The Guardian.
At the Washington conference, the presidents of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone appealed for help in the form of thousands of health workers and millions of additional dollars, both to fight Ebola and to prevent severe economic fallout in affected countries.
“The countries are in a very fragile situation,” Guinean President Alpha Conde said in Washington.
Liberia has been forced to divert its development funds to tackling Ebola, his Liberian counterpart Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said via videolink from Monrovia.
As international trade, investment, local agriculture and businesses are affected, the epidemic could cause economic damage worth 32.6 billion dollars in West Africa by the end of 2015, according to the World Bank.
“Unless we quickly contain and stop the Ebola epidemic, nothing less than the future, not only of West Africa, but perhaps even Africa, is at stake,” Kim said.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the treatment of Ebola patients evacuated from West Africa continued apace.
A male UN employee from Liberia landed in the eastern German town of Leipzig for treatment early Thursday, local officials said.
He is the third person infected with Ebola to be treated in Germany.
In Spain, the health of a nurse suffering from Ebola – the first infection on European soil – was in decline, her brother and her hospital in Madrid said.
On Wednesday, Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian man who was the first patient to be diagnosed with Ebola outside of Africa, died in a US hospital.
The latest infections have raised fears of the virus spreading within Europe. A spokesman for EU Health Commissioner Tonio Borg said that the introduction of new screenings at European airports was being discussed in Brussels.
“The best antidote to fear is an effective and urgent response,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in Washington, calling for a 20-fold increase in international assistance.
GNA
