UN: Number of ebola cases to double every 3 weeks

The number of ebola cases in West Africa could start doubling every three weeks and could end up costing €770m to contain the crisis, the World Health Organisation warned yesterday.

Even as US President Barack Obama was expected to announce the deployment of 3,000 American troops to help provide aid in the region, Medicines Sans Frontiers told the UN health agency that the global response to ebola was falling far short of what is needed.

“The response to ebola continues to fall dangerously behind,” Joanne Liu, president of the medical charity, told a UN meeting in Geneva. “The window of opportunity to contain this outbreak is closing. We need more countries to stand up, we need greater deployment, and we need it now.”

In a report, WHO said $987.8m (€763m) is needed for everything from paying health workers and buying supplies to tracing people who have been exposed to the virus, which is spread by contact with bodily fluids. Some $23.8m alone is needed to pay burial teams and buy body bags, since the bodies of victims are highly infectious and workers must wear protection suits.

Nearly 5,000 people have been sickened by ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria and Senegal since it was first recognised in March, with about half dying as a result. WHO says it anticipates that figure could rise to more than 20,000. At least 2,400 people have died, with Liberia bearing the brunt of the fatalities.

In addition to the US troops, the UN health agency said China has promised to send a 59-person mobile laboratory team to Sierra Leone that includes lab experts, epidemiologists, doctors and nurses. Britain is also planning to build and operate an ebola clinic in Sierra Leone, and Cuba has promised to send the country over 160 health workers.

Still, hospitals and clinics in West Africa are turning the sick away because they don’t have enough space to treat everyone — a surefire way to increase the spread of the disease.

The US drew criticism last week when it promised to set up a 25-bed field hospital in Liberia that would only serve foreign health workers. Many thought the contribution was discriminatory and paltry, given that experts were saying Liberia needed at least 500 more treatment beds.

Meanwhile, the response in Liberia, the country worst hit by the outbreak, will focus on community-level care units since new treatment centres are unlikely to be ready for weeks or months, WHO assistant director general Bruce Aylward said yesterday.

“The absolute first priority is to establish enough capacity to rapidly isolate the cases so that they are not infecting others.

“We need ebola treatment centres to do that, very very quickly, but they take time to build, as you’ve seen.

“It takes weeks, if not months, to get these facilities up and running. We have firm commitments for more than 500 additional beds in Liberia and we think we will hear announcements that will take that even further over the coming weeks.”

The WHO still has a goal to “bend the curve” in total ebola case numbers across West Africa within three months, but some areas may be free of the disease sooner, he said.