NEW YORK – The World Bank on Thursday announced an additional 100 million U.S. dollars funding for its Ebola crisis response.
The additional fund is meant to speed up deployment of foreign health workers to the three worst-affected countries in West Africa.
Ban’s spokesman, Stephane DuJarric, told UN Correspondents in New York that the World Bank’s additional financing would help set up a coordination hub.
The hub would be in close cooperation with Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response to recruit.
It would also help train and deploy qualified foreign health workers.
The current estimates by the United Nations, he said, indicate that about 5,000 international medical, training and support personnel are needed in the three countries to respond to the Ebola outbreak.
He said over the coming months, 700-1,000 foreign health workers would be required to treat patients in the Ebola treatment centres.
DuJarric said that the latest figures from the WHO reports a total of 13,703 cases and 4,922 deaths.
He said that the most intense transmission continues to occur in the Montserrado area, a region in the Liberian capital, Monrovia.
The spokesman said WHO stresses that the capacity to capture a true picture of the situation in the country remained hamstrung by the under-reporting of cases.
He said that the UN Dag Hammarskjold Library (DHL) had launched an online Ebola Research Guide.
The quick-start research guide, DuJarric said, brings together key information sources with a focus on policy and political issues around the epidemic.
On August 4 in Washington, the World Bank Group pledged 200 million U.S. dollars in emergency funding to contain the spread of Ebola infections.
The funding was pledged to help communities in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to cope with the economic impact of the crisis and improve public health systems throughout West Africa. (NAN)
