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 The United States alone has pledged more than $1 billion in
emergency hospital units, vaccine development, medical supplies and
training for Liberia, while the World Bank has mobilized $400
million in financing. The United Kingdom is building treatment units
in Sierra Leone and other countries are sending staff and supplies.
But health experts on the front line said this assistance is not
enough and not arriving fast enough to halt the spread of the deadly
hemorrhagic fever.
“The deployment is not sufficient in response to the crisis,” said
Sophie Delaunay, executive director of Doctors Without Borders, the
non-profit group that has led the response to the outbreak.
“There is not the capacity and the means to isolate the infected.
The irony is that we know what needs to be done, isolate the people,
but we don’t know how to do it quickly,” she said in a media
teleconference arranged by Kaiser Family Foundation.
Failure to scale up the response will cause the number of deaths to
rise, said Steve Monroe, a deputy director of infectious diseases at
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), even as his
agency announced the first confirmed case in the United States.
"The medical response has become a humanitarian crisis," he said.
CDC’s projections released last week showed that infections could
reach 1.4 million in a worst case scenario by late January, compared
with about 6,000 today. So far it has primarily affected Liberia,
Sierra Leone and Guinea plus several cases in Senegal and Nigeria,
which CDC said appear to be under control.
But Ebola infections are doubling every 24 days in Liberia, the
worst-hit country, said Joshua Michaud, assistant director of global
health policy at Kaiser Family Foundation. If interventions are
scaled up, the impact could be significant and the decline sharp, he
said.
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COMMUNITY CARE
Delaunay said her group, widely known by its French name Medecins
sans Frontieres (MSF), is concerned whether the Ebola treatment
centers that the United States and Britain are building will have
the highly trained staff needed to run the facilities, with a strong
director in a disciplined, command-and-control environment necessary
to prevent further infections.
Meanwhile, MSF is focusing on expanding a very basic level of care
to try and isolate the sick in place. The disease features fever,
vomiting and bleeding which make it highly contagious. The exact
form of care varies – in the home, or in a local building --
depending on the needs and resources of each community, she said.
“We are really experimenting with what is best, including
distributing home hygiene kits,” Delaunay said. Getting accurate
information to people about how to prevent infections by using the
kits, which are not designed for treatment, however, is a
challenging task, she said.
The vaccines under development are welcome, but they cannot be
deployed quickly enough to control the epidemic, she said.
(Reporting by Stella Dawson; Editing by Lisa Anderson)
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