Staff Writer, Reuters, Sapa-AFP
INTERNATIONAL medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) denounced world leaders yesterday for failing to intervene sufficiently in the Ebola crisis and made an unprecedented call for UN member states with biological-disaster response capacity to intervene.
MSF also said yesterday it was heartened by South Africa’s response. South Africa had already sent a mobile laboratory and three expert staff to Sierra Leone to help in the fight against Ebola. In addition, the South African health authorities and local experts were meeting this week to explore how to respond to the needs in west Africa. The Department of Health, infectious disease experts and other partners would determine the means available for a co-ordinated South African response.
MSF International President Dr Joanne Liu yesterday addressed a special briefing of UN member states in New York convened by the UN secretary-general and the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Liu said: “Six months into the worst Ebola epidemic in history, the world is losing the battle to contain it. Leaders are failing to come to grips with this transnational threat. The WHO announcement on August 8 that the epidemic constituted a ‘public health emergency of international concern’ has not led to decisive action, and states have essentially joined a global coalition of inaction.
“In west Africa cases and deaths continue to surge. Riots are breaking out. Isolation centres are overwhelmed. Health workers on the front lines are becoming infected and are dying in shocking numbers. Others have fled in fear, leaving people without care for even the most common illnesses. Entire health systems have crumbled.
“Ebola treatment centres are reduced to places where people go to die alone, where little more than palliative care is offered. It is impossible to keep up with the sheer number of infected people pouring into facilities. In Sierra Leone, infectious bodies are rotting in the streets. Rather than building new Ebola care centres in Liberia, we are forced to build crematoria.”
Liu’s sober assessment came after a scathing newspaper editorial in the Washington Post by the World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, in which he said the “disastrously inadequate” response to Ebola caused needless deaths. He urged wealthy nations to do more by sharing knowledge and resources to help African countries tackle the crisis.
“The crisis we are watching unfold derives less from the virus itself and more from deadly and misinformed biases that have led to a disastrously inadequate response to the outbreak,” Kim wrote in the editorial, co-written by Harvard University professor Paul Farmer, with whom Kim founded Partners In Health, a charity that works for better health care in poorer countries.
The WHO said last week that casualty figures might be to four times higher than reported, and that up to 20 000 people may be affected before the outbreak ends. It launched a $490 million (R5.2 billion) plan to contain the epidemic.
Kim and Farmer said that, if international organisations and wealthy nations mounted a co-ordinated response with West African nations using the WHO plan, the fatality rate could drop to below 20 percent – from 50 percent now.
“We are at a dangerous moment,” they wrote. “Tens of thousands of lives, the future of the region and hard-won economic and health gains for millions hang in the balance.”
In a vivid sign of the danger posed by inadequate health provision, a man escaped from an Ebola quarantine centre in Monrovia on Monday and sent people fleeing in fear as he walked through a market in search of food, a witness said.
The patient, who wore a tag showing he had tested positive for Ebola, held a stick and threw stones at a doctor from the centre in the Paynesville neighbourhood, who stood at a distance and tried to persuade him to give himself up. At one point, he stumbled and fell, apparently weakened by illness. Healthcare workers wearing protective clothing forced him into a medical vehicle and returned him to the facility.
Ebola can only be transmitted by contact with the bodily fluids of a sick person, but rigorous measures are required for its containment. There is no proven cure, though work on experimental vaccines has been accelerated.
More than 1 500 people have been killed in West Africa in the worst outbreak since the disease was discovered in 1976 near the Ebola river in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. More than 3 000 people, mostly in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, have been infected.
Liberia had just 50 doctors for its 4.3 million people before the outbreak, and many medical workers have died of Ebola. Shortages of basic goods, foodstuffs and medical equipment have been worsened by airlines’ refusal to stop flying to the worst-hit countries. Several neighbouring states have closed their borders and many international organisations have pulled out foreign staff.
The UN warned yesterday of “grave food security concerns”. Restrictions on movement in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone have led to panic buying, food shortages and severe price hikes.
“The clock is ticking and Ebola is winning,” said Liu yesterday. “The time for meetings and planning is over. It is now time to act. Every day of inaction means more deaths and the slow collapse of societies.”