"It's spiraling out of control. It is getting worse. It's spreading faster and exponentially. Today, thousands of people in West Africa are infected. That number could rapidly grow to tens of thousands.

"And if the outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people infected with profound political and economic and security implications for all of us."

As well as the military deployment, the US will also set up a command and control center in the capital of Liberia, the hardest-hit country, build new treatment centers and train health workers.

Precise timing on deployment was still unclear.

"No deployment in the coming days. The troops have to be properly trained and equipped," a Pentagon official said privately. Among the US soldiers sent to West Africa will be doctors and also engineers to set up the field hospitals, the official said.

Meanwhile, the United States moved to fund these plans.

Specifically, the Department of Defense plans to ask Wednesday to have reprogrammed "an additional $500 million in Fiscal Year 2014 Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funds to provide urgent humanitarian assistance to fight Ebola," an administration official said.

This is separate from the funds already put toward the effort, including the $175 million already dedicated, and the $88 million requested through a continuing resolution.

The Ebola epidemic has killed more than 2,400 people in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone this year.

The virus can fell its victims within days, causing severe fever and muscle pain, weakness, vomiting and diarrhea -- in some cases shutting down organs and causing unstoppable bleeding.

No licenced vaccine or treatment exists.

The United Nations Security Council is poised to adopt a resolution on Thursday exhorting countries to provide more field hospitals and urgent aid to the crisis-stricken region.

Likely passage of the resolution marks only the third time that the Security Council will vote on a public health crisis after resolutions on AIDS in 2000 and 2011.

"This has gone beyond health issues," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said.

"It has gone to areas affecting social and economic situations. It may even affect political stability if not properly contained and treated."

The United Nations said nearly one billion dollars would be needed to beat back the worst-ever outbreak of the disease, which is on track to infect 20,000 people by the end of the year.

The world body has set a goal of stopping the spread of Ebola within six to nine months but aid agencies are complaining that help has been too slow.

Ban is planning a "high-level event" on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly next week to draw attention to the crisis.

UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos told reporters in Geneva the Ebola crisis faced a "huge funding challenge."

The capacity of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia to provide even the most basic necessities is "on the brink of collapse," she warned.

The United Nations said the response to the crisis would require $987.8 million (763 million euros), with about half needed for Liberia.

The World Bank meanwhile approved a $105 million grant, part of a $200 million pledge made in early August aimed at helping people cope with the economic impact of the crisis and strengthening public health systems.

"The world needs to do much, much more to respond to the Ebola crisis in these three countries," World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said in a statement.

The UN said if the international community and affected countries respond swiftly and energetically, transmission should begin to slow by the end of the year and halt by mid-2015.

"The level of surge we need to do is unprecedented. It is massive," the United Nations' Ebola coordinator David Nabarro told reporters.

China will send a 59-person mobile laboratory team from its Centre for Disease Control to Sierra Leone, including epidemiologists, clinicians and nurses -- bringing the number of Chinese medics in the country to 174, the WHO said.

The EU, Britain, France and Cuba have also pledged to send medical teams and other aid to the region.

But this is far from enough, warned Joanne Liu, head of the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) charity.

Noting that the known Ebola toll "represents only a fraction of the real number," she stressed that "the ground response remains totally and lethally inadequate."

"The window of opportunity to contain this outbreak is closing," she warned.

AFP

Workers wearing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) suits carry a body at the Elwa hospital run by Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders). AFP Photo

Ebola: 'In decades of humanitarian work, I've never seen such suffering'

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/14/ebola-decades-humanitarian-work-never-seen-such-suffering 

 

I wake up each morning – if I have managed to sleep – wondering if this is really happening, or if it is a horror movie. In decades of humanitarian work I have never witnessed such relentless suffering of fellow human beings or felt so completely paralysed and utterly overwhelmed at our inability to provide anything but the most basic, and sometimes less than adequate, care.

I am supervising the suspect tent, which has room for 25 patients who are likely to have Ebola – 80-90% of those we test have the virus. We administer treatment for malaria, start patients on antibiotics, paracetamol, multivitamins, rehydration supplements, food, water and juice while they wait for their results. Sometimes people have arrived too late and die shortly after arriving.

In one afternoon last week I watched five seemingly fit, healthy, young men die. I gave the first a bottle of oral rehydration solution and came back with another for the second. In the half a minute or so in which I had been away the first man died, his bottle of water spilt across the floor. The four others followed in quick succession.

We sometimes have to hold back tears but try to offer patients all the comfort that we can – especially if they are in their last moments. I cannot spend as much time as I would like with each of them due to the intense heat of the personal protective equipment and the sheer number of patients.

My colleagues in logistics are doing a fantastic job of building new extensions and hopefully, in the next week, we will increase our capacity further still. In the meantime, we are only open to admit patients for a couple of hours each day before all our beds are full again. Once admitted, patients spend 10-14 days with us, and if their body beats the virus – and they have three days in which they do not show symptoms – we perform another test to see if they have fully recovered.

Unfortunately, people die before they even reach our centre. It is a difficult and dangerous procedure to remove a body from a vehicle and the team often has to do this many times a day. We have been forced to order an incinerator from Europe because the local crematorium cannot cope with the number of bodies.

Each day this week patients have recovered – in the early stages there were no survivors whatsoever. Yesterday seven people went home, including a young man who had painted the inside of one of our tents red when he arrived because he was bleeding so profusely. Our team had thought he had no hope of survival. It is lovely to see the patients going home with their certificate of discharge, though most have lost family members or friends, and can face stigma upon their return.

I believe MSF is doing a fantastic job, but we are only able to care for a minority of the people in Monrovia who have Ebola. We also work in the north of the country, but every county is now reporting cases and we have absolutely no capacity to respond.

It is extremely sad to see the indifference of the international community with regards to this epidemic. It is great to see an added interest and investment in research for vaccines, but we urgently need experts who are physically present and more structures on the ground here in west Africa, where the situation continues to be catastrophic.
The author is an aid worker for Médecins Sans Frontières who wished to remain anonymous

THE deadliest Ebola epidemic on record has now infected nearly 5,000 people in west Africa and killed around half of them, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.


The UN health agency said a total of 4,985 people had been infected across five west African countries, and that 2,461 had died.


In the three hardest-hit countries of Guinea, Libera and Sierra Leone, nearly half of the cases were recorded in the past three weeks, WHO said.


Here are the latest WHO numbers:


In Guinea, where the outbreak began at the start of the year, Ebola had as of September 13 claimed 595 lives, or 64 percent of the 936 people infected.


Thirty-three percent of those cases surfaced in the 21 days leading up to September 13.

In Liberia, which has been hardest-hit by the outbreak, 1,296 people had died from Ebola as of September 9, representing 54 percent of the 2,407 people infected.

A full 57 percent, or 1,383, of those cases were recorded during the three weeks before September 9.

In Sierra Leone, 562 people had died from Ebola by September 13, accounting for 35 percent of the 1,620 people infected.

Forty percent of those cases were recorded during the preceding 21 days.

Nigeria had meanwhile, as of September 13, seen eight Ebola deaths since the virus first arrived in the country with a Liberian finance ministry official who died in Lagos on July 25.

That amounts to 38 percent of the 21 cases. Six of those cases have emerged in the past three weeks.

Senegal's only confirmed Ebola case -- a Guinean student who crossed the border just before it was closed on August 21 -- has recovered, but the country will not be declared transmission free before 42 days have passed since the case was recorded.

Separate outbreak
The Democratic Republic of Congo has meanwhile been hit by a separate Ebola outbreak, which as of September 14 had killed 39 people, including eight health workers, out of 66 cases.

There are five known distinct strains of Ebola, and the outbreak raging in west Africa stems from the Zaire strain.


That strain caused the world's first known Ebola outbreak in DR Congo in 1976, until now the deadliest on record, with 280 deaths.


The current DR Congo outbreak meanwhile is believed to come from two separate strains, the Zaire and the Sudan strain, which first surfaced in Sudan, also in 1976.