UN and medical group appeal for aid to contain Ebola

The United Nations and the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) each issued urgent appeals yesterday for international aid to contain the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Senior UN officials urged diplomats to cable their capitals to send money, doctors and protective gear to the affected region. The doctors' group called for countries to send civilian and military biohazard experts.

Jan Eliasson, the deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, said at a meeting of the General Assembly yesterday that the outbreak was “a test to international solidarity.” More than 3,500 cases have been confirmed so far, with more than 1,500 deaths, making the outbreak the largest and most complex since the disease was first identified in 1976. Three countries in West Africa - Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone - account for most of the cases, but there have also been confirmed cases in Nigeria and Senegal.

A separate strain of the virus has been detected farther east, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with 53 cases confirmed there, UN officials said. Public health officials said the rate at which new cases are being identified is rising.

"We understand the outbreak is moving out of our grasp," said Dr David Nabarro, the UN special envoy for the Ebola crisis. Dr Margaret Chan, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), said yesterday that "the outbreak will get worse before it gets better, and it requires a well-coordinated big surge of outbreak response urgently." Her agency has described the outbreak as "a global threat," one whose magnitude Dr Chan said "we all underestimated."

UN officials said it was impossible to predict how many more people would be infected, and warned that the virus could spread further. The virus was apparently carried to Nigeria by an infected traveller who flew to Lagos, the country’s commercial capital, from Liberia. It has since been detected in Port Harcourt, a bustling oil city in the south. Senegal reported a confirmed case of Ebola after someone carrying the virus travelled by land from neighbouring Guinea, slipping through the cracks of a system meant to monitor travellers.

A number of airlines have stopped flying in and out of West African capitals. But Dr Chan said a better way to bring the outbreak under control would be to improve screening of passengers at airports, rather than restricting air travel. The disruptions caused by the outbreak have already led to food shortages in the most severely affected countries, and may affect the rice and maize harvests, the Food and Agriculture Organization has said.

Doctors Without Borders criticized WHO yesterday for not acting sooner to bring the outbreak under control. The doctors’ group’s international president, Dr Joanne Liu, told diplomats at the United Nations that countries with expertise in handling biological threats should help the affected countries by setting up mobile laboratories and field hospitals to treat Ebola patients.

“It is your historic responsibility to act,” Dr Liu said. “We cannot cut off the affected countries and hope this epidemic will simply burn out. To put out this fire, we must run into the burning building.”

Because the virus is transmitted very readily through contact with fluids, medical caregivers have been prominent among the victims of the outbreak so far. A US missionary doctor who had been treating obstetrics patients in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, was diagnosed with Ebola, a Christian missionary organization called SIM announced yesterday.

WHO is to convene a meeting of scientists later this week to decide how to put to use experimental vaccines against Ebola. Canada has offered to donate 800 to 1,000 doses of one vaccine that is still undergoing trials.

New York Times