International community ‘lapped’ in race against Ebola

The international community is not just losing the race against Ebola but is "getting lapped," US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power told a New York fundraiser for the Irish humanitarian agency Goal last night.

The Dublin-born diplomat compared the outbreak with the Irish Famine, urging countries to act “more robustly” and “more swiftly” to contain the virus that has killed more than 4,000 people in West Africa.

She noted that just 25 nations had each pledged more than $1 million to the crisis out of 193 countries at the UN.

Speaking to about 300 Irish and Irish-American guests at the charity’s annual function in Manhattan, Ms Power said the number of infections in Guinea and Sierra Leone is projected to double every three to four weeks and every two weeks in Liberia - the three worst countries affected by Ebola.

“This is mad,” she said, imploring private companies and institutions to tackle “one of the worst health crises the world has ever seen.”

"Far too few are giving far too little, counting on others to step up," said Ms Power (44), a close and long-time aide of President Barack Obama whom he appointed ambassador to the UN last year.

The former journalist began her speech quoting from a news report describing a scene of disease and death: “Not a single house could boast of being free from death and fever, though several could be pointed out with the dead lying close to the living.”

This could have written about a village affected by Ebola, she said, but it was published in 1847 in a London newspaper by a journalist from Cork describing an Irish town during the Great Famine.

She praised Goal’s work particularly in Sierra Leone in the Ebola crisis, saying that it is impossible to understand the “proud tradition of Irish generosity or the passion for service that drives ‘Goalies’ in the field without understanding the history of the Irish people.”

That tradition comes from people who have come through an experience like the Irish Famine and was “in the genes,” she said.

Paying tribute to her Irish roots, she said this tradition was “in the bloodstream” of her biggest mentor, her mother, who brought her to the US at the age of nine, and, she hoped, would pass to her children Declan and Rian.

She told the audience that people often tell her that her last name is appropriate for a representative of the US but that she tells them it comes from the Irish ‘De Paor’ meaning “of the poor.”

“With a name like this and the responsibilities that go with it, how could I not join Goal tonight when so many here are gathering in support of an organisation that does so much for the most vulnerable and the poor around the world?” said Ms Power.

She praised the humanitarian agency for developing a training model in Sierra Leone that prevented the spread of Ebola and treated victims “with dignity rather than as prisoners or pariahs.”

The Irish charity and other humanitarian groups had also enlisted community activists to dispel dangerous rumours about Ebola and raise awareness about the risks of hand-washing bodies of dead relatives.

Referring to the three cases in the US, including two nurses who caught the virus, Ms Power said the spreading fear of the disease was “understandable” as people didn’t want hospitals treating the infected if health workers “will get sick and themselves help spread the virus.”

Doctors and nurses just need the right training that health workers in Georgia and Nebraska had when they followed official protocols and nursed Ebola patients from West Africa back to health, she said.

In her conclusion, Ms Power evoked the Irish Famine again, recalling a scene of the dying and the dead near a plentiful food market.

One million lives could have been saved, she said, because Ireland had supplies of food that could have fed people.

“Our world today has everything that we need to curb the spread of the deadly virus of Ebola and while it may not be around the corner in a market, we can get the necessary supplies to the affected,” she said.

Goal chief executive Barry Andrews criticised the absence of an energetic international response to the crisis in Africa.

"We have to take an attitude of if we don't fight it there now, we end up fighting it here for many years to come," he told The Irish Times.