Thursday, October 09, 2014

African Leaders Tell IMF-World Bank They Need More Help to Fight Ebola
A Liberian reading newspaper accounts related to US assistance.
By Shawn Donnan in Washington
Financial Times

The leaders of the three countries hit hardest by the Ebola outbreak pleaded on Thursday for the international community to speed up its response, warning that they needed thousands more medical workers and other resources to contain the virus.

“Our people are dying, children are being orphaned,” Ernest Bai Koroma, president of Sierra Leone, told a special session convened on the sidelines of the annual IMF and World Bank meetings in Washington. “Without you we cannot succeed.”

The plea from Mr Koroma, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and Alpha Condé of Guinea to the meeting convened by Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank president, came alongside stark assessments of the difficulty of the fight ahead.

According to the World Health Organisation the outbreak has killed more than 3,800 people and infected more than 8,000, almost all of them in the three African countries. But the death of a man infected in Liberia in Texas this week and the diagnosis of a Spanish nurse who was infected while treating an Ebola patient at a Madrid hospital have raised new fears in the developed world as well.

Mr Kim, who is an infectious diseases and public health expert, said the international community was “way, way behind the curve” in tackling the outbreak adding, “we have to quickly speed up, and scale up the global response.”

The World Bank president called urgently for countries around the world to send additional medical staff to the three affected countries.

Tom Frieden, the head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, likened the fight against Ebola to that against Aids and said the world needed to mobilise quickly to prevent the outbreak in Africa spreading.

The Ebola virus was “changing quickly”, Dr Frieden warned. “Speed is the most important variable here.”

Ebola is one of several risks facing west Africa

Global equity and debt markets and international policy makers are awaking to the economic implications of the Ebola outbreak in three west African countries.

The predictions of economic losses vary from apocalyptic billions of dollars in the worse-case scenario to only a few millions of dollars if the outbreak is stopped soon. The discrepancies can be seen in two forecasts by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The IMF believes that Sierra Leone, one of the affected countries, will remain in 2014 and 2015 among the world’s top-10 fastest growing countries. The latter is warning of more than $30bn in losses next year.

Bruce Aylward, the World Health Organisation’s co-ordinator on Ebola, said the response needed was similar to that mobilised against polio, which took thousands of health workers around the world.

While that fight took 10-20 years to establish, he told reporters after the meeting, the current one against Ebola needed to be done in “weeks”.

The virus, he said, was “accelerating in almost all of the settings” in west Africa while the international community was still “not at common purpose”.

“We have to eliminate the virus but we [also] have to eliminate the excuses,” said Dr Aylward.

Mr Koroma said Sierra Leone needed more than 5,000 medical workers, including 750 doctors and 3,000 nurses. The two treatment centres Sierra Leone had now were not enough and it needed 1,500 more beds just for Ebola patients. The four laboratories in the country were able to handle only 100 diagnostic samples a day, he said, and five more were urgently needed.

Ms Sirleaf, who like Mr Koroma addressed the meeting by videoconference, bemoaned what had been a “slow international response” and said her country still badly needed more help to treat the outbreak.

Mr Condé of Guinea said his government was still struggling to fight the virus with limited financial resources and technical skills.

“We need urgent funding,” he told the meeting.

The pleas from the three presidents came as donors around the table including the US, EU, China and Japan vowed to step up their efforts and do whatever was needed to fight Ebola.

But those vows were also accompanied by their own expressions of frustration with the slow pace of the response and pleas for better co-ordination.

Masanori Yoshida, Japan’s representative at the meeting, complained that Tokyo’s efforts had been hit by bureaucratic delays in Africa. A batch of 20,000 protective suits for medical staff in affected countries had been sent from Tokyo almost a month ago and yet they were still stuck in the airport in
Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast, because of “quarantine issues”, he said.

Justine Greening, the UK’s development secretary, said while countries had committed in London last week to establish a trust fund to fight Ebola, the actual donations were still coming in too slowly.

“We need much, much more and a much faster response from the international community,” she told the meeting.

Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, said the fund was prepared to do whatever was needed to help the affected countries and their neighbours fight the outbreak. Ms Lagarde said she was even encouraging the countries involved to run bigger budget deficits to respond to the crisis.

“The IMF doesn’t say that very often,” she said.

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