“There’s nowhere close to the money we require, nowhere close to the personnel we require, nowhere close to the assets we require,” Anthony Banbury, the head of the United Nations mission to contain Ebola, said by phone from Accra, Ghana, after reviewing the needs on the ground. “It’s unconscionable.”
Jan Egeland, a former United Nations official and now head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said his group could not send health experts to West Africa until they were assured of proper care if they get Ebola and of being treated in an Ebola-free hospital if they are in an accident.
The United States military is now building a treatment center for foreign aid workers in Monrovia, the Liberian capital; it is projected to be ready by early next month. The European Union recently announced a medical evacuation system for international health workers.
“All of this should have been fixed early on” by the United Nations, in cooperation with the United States and European Union, Mr. Egeland said.
Aid has picked up since the Security Council’s appeals. The United States plans to build 18 treatment centers across Liberia. Germany is building a treatment center in Sierra Leone and another in Liberia, and using its military aircraft to transport supplies for the United Nations. China announced that it would send motorcycles to help track the disease, along with $6 million for food to those who are quarantined. A consortium of East African countries have promised to send 600 health workers.
But hospitals are needed for non-Ebola patients, too, and even before the Ebola outbreak, Liberia had a severe shortage of medical staff.
“The focus, rightly so, has been to set up treatment centers, but if you have people coming to them with malaria, labor complications or other health needs, there are currently no hospitals or clinics to safely refer them,” said Kris Torgeson, a liaison officer for Doctors Without Borders in Liberia.
Mr. Banbury, who was in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, working to muster an international response, called the Ebola epidemic the toughest and most complex humanitarian crisis he had ever seen.
Haiti is a critical object lesson for the United Nations. The earthquake was followed by a deadly cholera outbreak, and the United Nations has never addressed whether its peacekeepers were to blame. It faces a class-action lawsuit over cholera. Nor has it come close to rallying donors to help Haiti curb the disease once and for all. (NY Times)