EmailBritain and the United States have issued stark warnings that the international community will be responsible for a substantial loss of life in west Africa and a greater threat across the world unless the financial and medical response to the Ebola crisis is intensified.
As the World Health Organisation (WHO) admitted mishandling the early stages of the Ebola outbreak in west Africa, US secretary of state John Kerry said a failure to respond could turn Ebola into “a scourge like HIV or polio”.
In some of his strongest remarks since the outbreak of the virus, Kerry criticised the international community for providing only a third of the UN target of $1bn (£620m). Speaking to the Washington diplomatic corps at the state department, Kerry called on world leaders to provide cash, helicopters and treatment centres.
Reflecting growing impatience with the limited response from countries such as Russia and China, he said: “If we don’t adequately address this current outbreak now, then Ebola has the potential to become a scourge like HIV or polio, that we will end up fighting, all of us, for decades. And we shouldn’t kid ourselves. Winning this fight is going to be costly, it is going to take all of our efforts, and it is not risk-free.”
David Cameron wrote to the European council president, Herman Van Rompuy, to call on EU leaders to agree at a summit next week to donate an extra €1bn (£790m) and to despatch 2,000 European clinicians and workers to the region within a month.
In his letter in advance of a European summit in Brussels next week, the UK prime minister wrote: “If we do not significantly step up our collective response now, the loss of life and damage to the political, economic and social fabric of the region will be substantial and the threat posed to our citizens will also grow.”
In addition to the extra €1bn, Cameron wants EU leaders to agree to dispatch at least 2,000 workers to west Africa within the next month, to increase co-ordination of screening at European ports, and to improve coordination of flights to west Africa to fly frontline health staff to the region. Britain believes Germany is starting to respond, though it considers this has been slow.
The interventions by Britain and the US came as:
• Barack Obama named an Ebola “tsar” to take charge of combating the virus in the US and health officials revealed they were monitoring 16 people connected to a nurse who has the virus. The government also asked three biology labs to submit plans for producing the experimental anti-Ebola drug ZMapp;
• GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical group, said a vaccine it was working on would be “too late for this epidemic”;
• the death toll rose to 4,546 out of 9,191 cases in west Africa.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warned that international pledges were not having any impact on the spread of the virus. Christopher Stokes, who is leading the charity’s response, welcomed pledges of help, but told the BBC they were “not having any significant impact on the epidemic and it won’t now for maybe another month or month and a half”.
The sense of chaos was highlighted when a WHO draft internal document obtained by the Associated Press accepted there was widespread failure to recognise the risks of the disease in the fragile states of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. “Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall.” Experts should have realised that the conventional way of containing an Ebola outbreak would not work in a region with porous borders and broken health systems, the document said.
The warnings came after Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, chided the international community because only $100,000 had been paid into his $1bn trust fund to fight Ebola. A further $20m has been pledged but not received. A wider UN appeal has received $376m, about 38% of the amount the UN is seeking to raise for that appeal.
Kofi Annan, a former UN secretary general, said he was “bitterly disappointed” with the response of the international community, which would have been different if the crisis had erupted in the west. Annan told BBC Newsnight: “If the crisis had hit some other region it probably would have been handled very differently. In fact, when you look at the evolution of the crisis, the international community really woke up when the disease got to America and Europe.”
Cameron made clear his impatience with the slow response of fellow EU leaders in his letter to Van Rompuy which is designed to encourage EU leaders to “wake up” to the crisis, in the words of the UK’s international development secretary Justine Greening.
In the letter to Van Rompuy, Cameron wrote: “The Ebola outbreak in west Africa is an issue that requires a substantial global response. The rapid spread of the disease and recent cases outside the west African region demonstrate the magnitude of the task at hand. The WHO forecast 20,000 cases in west Africa by November 2014.
“I believe that much more must be done. The European Council next week provides us with the opportunity to commit to an ambitious package of support to help reduce the rate of transmission in west Africa, to reduce the risk of transmission within Europe, and to pledge long-term support to assist with recovery, resilience and stability in the region. By coordinating our approach, I believe the EU and its member states can maximise the effectiveness of our response.”
Britain believes itself and the US have led the world response to the Ebola crisis. Britain has pledged more than £125m in aid to Sierra Leone because of its historic ties to its former west African colony. Britain is providing more than 700 treatment beds across the country, while 750 troops are to be deployed there.
The US and France are focusing on Liberia and Guinea because of their own historic ties to the countries.
The prime minister’s pointed remarks are also aimed at China and Russia which are seen to have failed to rise to the occasion. But Xiaoyan Jiang, spokeswoman for the Chinese mission to the EU, defended China’s contributions, saying that prime minister Li Kegiang had pledged another 100 million yuan (£10.1m) at the ASEM summit in Milan.
That figure came on top of the 234m yuan (£23.7m) already spent by Beijing on emergency assistance in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, she added. China had also sent some 200 medical staff to the three countries, and the plan was for them to “help train more than 10,000 medical personnel” on the ground.
“I can assure you China has done a lot. We have provided a lot of assistance to the African countries,” she said. Russian officials on Thursday said the government had earmarked £11.9 million to fight the spread of the Ebola virus in west Africa. Russia has also deployed a team of health workers to Guinea to help fight the epidemic, chief sanitation doctor Anna Popova said during a meeting with the prime minister Dmitry Medvedev on Friday.
French aid to Guinea adds up to more than €70m. Of this, half is being spent in Guinea and on preventative measures in neighbouring countries, including Ivory Coast.
France is setting up an Ebola treatment centre in Guinea operated by the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières, and a Pastor Institute in Conakry to train Guinean biologists in collaboration with the Pastor Institutes in Dakar and Paris.
France is also beefing up laboratories in seven west African countries, including Guinea. The other half has been given to internationally coordinated measures, including the European Commission, the World Bank and the African Development Bank.
The German government has so far promised to support the aid effort in west Africa with a total of €102m. After originally promising to spend €17m, the government announced on Thursday that it would allocate a further €85m to fight Ebola.
“What we are doing to help in west Africa is necessary help for the people there, but also effective protection for the people of Europe”, said health minister Herman Gröhe.
Of the additional €85m, €50m will be assigned to the development ministry, while €35m will go to the German foreign office.
