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Obama Presses Leaders to Speed Ebola Response (1546 hits)


ATLANTA — President Obama on Tuesday challenged world powers to accelerate the global response to the Ebola outbreak that is ravaging West Africa, warning that unless health care workers, medical equipment and treatment centers were swiftly deployed, the disease could take hundreds of thousands of lives.

“This epidemic is going to get worse before it gets better,” Mr. Obama said here at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he met with doctors who had just returned from West Africa. The world, he said, “has the responsibility to act, to step up and to do more. The United States intends to do more.”

Even as the president announced a major American deployment to Liberia and Senegal of medicine, equipment and 3,000 military personnel, global health officials said that time was running out and that they had weeks, not months, to act. They said that although the American contribution was on a scale large enough to make a difference, a coordinated assault in Africa from other Western powers was essential to bringing the virus under control.

“Everyone realizes that no one group or one country or one organization is going to be able to tackle this,” Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank and an expert in infectious diseases, said in a telephone interview hours after the bank’s board unanimously approved a $105 million grant as part of its previously announced assistance to the most affected of the countries. He praised the American effort as “extremely encouraging,” but said it remained unclear how the United States would coordinate its effort with relief groups. “This is all being put together on the fly,” he said.

Administration officials said they urgently needed stronger responses from Britain and France, countries that, along with the United States, have colonial ties to the three hardest-hit African countries: Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

So far, France has sent $13 million to Guinea for two tons of medical equipment and the construction of medical centers, and $15.5 million and 24 doctors to Senegal and Ivory Coast, other former French colonies. British troops, the government said last week, are headed to Sierra Leone, a former British colony, to build and staff a 63-bed facility near the capital, Freetown.

On Tuesday night, administration officials said the Pentagon would ask Congress to redirect $500 million from existing Defense Department funds to fight Ebola. The money is in addition to $500 million the Pentagon requested last week in redirected funds for both Iraq and Ebola.

In Washington, New York and Geneva, health experts expressed astonishment and alarm at the virus’s rapid spread.

“The pace of the disease and also its impact have taken our breath away — it’s been that massive,” said Shanelle Hall, director of the supply division at Unicef, which has sent about 550 tons of supplies to West Africa in the past several weeks and has plans to almost triple that amount by the beginning of next month. “We hope other governments also come in with commensurate levels of support.”

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On Capitol Hill, Dr. Beth P. Bell, the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases at the C.D.C., told a Senate hearing that although Ebola did not currently pose a significant public health threat to the United States, “there is a window of opportunity to control the spread of this disease, but that window is closing.”

At the United Nations, the Security Council prepared to convene for a rare emergency meeting on Thursday to mobilize a response. It also took action on a global health issue in 2000 and 2011, when it passed resolutions on AIDS.

Senior United Nations officials said in Geneva that cases of the disease were rising at an almost exponential rate, with the number of reported cases now at 4,985, including 2,461 deaths. Half of the infections, according to Dr. Bruce Aylward, an assistant director general of the World Health Organization, occurred in the past 21 days, underscoring the acceleration of the outbreak. “We don’t know where the numbers are going with this,” Dr. Aylward said at a news conference.

Mr. Obama echoed those words. “We can’t dawdle on this one,” the president said. “We have to move with force and make sure that we are catching this as best we can, given that it has already broken out in ways that we had not seen before.”

But just how fast the American military can build 17 treatment centers of 100 beds each in Liberia, as planned, is still in question. Liberian officials say 1,000 beds are needed there in the next week alone to contain the disease. American military officials cautioned that they were not close to getting that number of beds up and running and said it would take time — perhaps as long as two weeks — before personnel arrived to begin setting up the first treatment centers.

Defense Department officials said that once constructed, the treatment centers would be turned over to Liberia and staffed by local and international health care providers, although health care experts say they are having difficulty finding doctors. A small number of American physicians and nurses are among the 3,000 military personnel en route to Liberia and Senegal, but administration officials said they would serve as trainers to other health care workers.

Some health experts said the president’s plan focused too much on Liberia and not enough on Guinea and Sierra Leone. “An uneven response in the region may trigger unintended flows of people seeking care from American centers,” said Dr. Jack Chow, a professor of global health at Carnegie Mellon University and a former official at the World Health Organization.

But in Liberia, half a year after the start of the outbreak, the authorities remain incapable of carrying out the most basic steps needed to stop the spread of Ebola, including picking up the dead and isolating potentially infectious people. In the capital, bodies are often left in houses and neighborhoods for up to three days before they are taken away by burial teams. Because of a shortage of ambulances, families with visibly sick relatives take taxis to full treatment centers, where they are often turned away.

As Ebola spread through the capital last month, Liberia’s government initially asserted control over the fight against the virus, even placing an entire slum in Monrovia under quarantine, against international advice. But facing a deteriorating situation on the ground and increasing pressure by politicians and the news media to “outsource” the battle, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf wrote to Mr. Obama and the leaders of China, Russia and several other countries asking for direct help.

Because of Liberia’s historical ties to the United States — it was founded by freed American slaves in 1822 — a visible American military presence would not draw the kind of backlash it would elsewhere in Africa.

On Tuesday, many in Monrovia welcomed news of greater American involvement. “It will help us,” said the Rev. Otis Borbor, the pastor at the Lighthouse Assemblies of God church in Caldwell, one of Monrovia’s most affected neighborhoods. “That’s what we were praying for, the pastors. We were praying to God that he may send people to rescue us and carry help to the country. So when we heard that, we were happy.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/world/af...


Posted By: Jeni Fa
Wednesday, September 17th 2014 at 9:04AM
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..."Senior United Nations officials said in Geneva that cases of the disease were rising at an almost exponential rate, with the number of reported cases now at 4,985, including 2,461 deaths. "...





Wednesday, September 17th 2014 at 9:09AM
Jeni Fa
..."$1 BILLION NEEDED TO FIGHT EBOLA According to the U.N., it will cost roughly $1 billion dollars to combat the epidemic. A Senate panel called for more assistance than President Obama has currently offered. Here’s what the Ebola fight means for the U.S. military. And these 14 numbers break down the magnitude of the virus’s deadly outbreak."...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/16/e...



Wednesday, September 17th 2014 at 9:17AM
Jeni Fa

$1 BILLION NEEDED TO FIGHT EBOLA

that $ amount is one week of bombing

Let the Senators and Representatives go on a factfinding junket to Sierra Leone


Saturday, September 20th 2014 at 8:23PM
powell robert
I know, right!



Wednesday, October 1st 2014 at 8:33AM
Jeni Fa
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