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Ebola Outbreak Erodes Recent Advances in West Africa

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Wed, 2014-10-22 07:59 — mike kraft

NEW YORK TIMES                                 Oct. 22, 2014

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 UNITED NATIONS — Nineteen thousand doctors and nurses will soon be needed to make a dent in West Africa’s Ebola outbreak, but the world has yet to send more than a small fraction of them, the United Nations says. Of the 1,000 vehicles needed to help the effort, only 69 have arrived. Of the 500 burial teams needed to ensure that infected corpses do not spread the disease, only 50 are now on the ground — and there is no clarity on who will pay them.


British Army medics boarded a flight Tuesday to Sierra Leone , a former British colony, where they will build treatment centers.--Matt Cardy/Getty Images

In the breach, Ebola is fast washing away the small gains made over the last decade in war-scarred parts of West Africa, as schools shut down, immunization campaigns are suspended and a food crisis looms as farmers abandon their fields.

...The biggest gap now is staffing. The United Nations emergency Ebola mission says the 19,000 doctors, nurses and paramedics are needed by Dec. 1. By then, 10,000 Ebola patients could be pouring in each week. To turn around the transmission rate, the United Nations has set an ambitious goal: to isolate at least 70 percent of the sick and conduct safe burials for at least 70 percent of the dead.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/22/world/ebola-outbreak-erodes-recent-advances-in-west-africa.html?hpw&rref=science&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpHedThumbWell&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

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Wed, 2014-10-22 17:07 — mike kraft

THE CANADIAN PRESS                                            Oct. 21, 2014
 
By Helen Branswell

TORONTO – The international president of Medecins Sans Frontieres says it’s time to move on from the process of blame-laying for the globe’s disastrously slow response to the West African Ebola outbreak.

Montrealer Dr. Joanne Liu said the world should be focused on fixing the problem, rather than figuring out who is at fault for the fact that the global community failed to grasp how bad this outbreak would become.

“I think that we need to move away from finding a scapegoat for the fact that we got where we are, because there’s a lot of attention towards (that) and I don’t think it’s constructive attention,” Liu said in an interview from MSF’s Geneva headquarters....

Liu was referring to an internal World Health Organization document that The Associated Press and Bloomberg obtained last week. The report — which the WHO later said was preliminary and had not yet been fact-checked — painted a damning picture of the agency’s own initial response to the outbreak.

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http://metronews.ca/news/canada/1190073/park-the-ebola-blame-msf-president-says/

 

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