World leaders must immediately deploy civilian and military medical teams to fight the world’s biggest outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, the head of an international medical charity said in New York on Tuesday.
The international response has so far relied on overstretched health ministries and nongovernmental organisations to tackle the exceptionally large outbreak of the disease, Medecins sans Frontieres President Joanne Liu told U.N. member states at their New York headquarters.
Liu accused world leaders of “failing to come to grips with this transnational threat,” and said they had “essentially joined a global coalition of inaction,” despite the World Health Organisation’s Aug. 8 announcement that the epidemic constituted a ‘public health emergency of international concern.’
Her remarks followed World Bank President Jim Yong Kim’s declaration on Monday that many people were dying unnecessarily from a “disastrously inadequate response” to the disease and that wealthy nations ought to share their knowledge and resources to help African countries.
Ebola is a haemorrhagic virus for which there is currently no widely available vaccine or cure. Since the outbreak began in March, more than 3,000 people have been infected in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria and Senegal and half of them have died.
The WHO set out a ‘road map’ last week on how to fight the outbreak. The virus, spread through direct contact with infected tissues and fluids, could infect up to 20,000 people and cost $490 million to control over the next six months, it said.
The MSF said transmission rates had reached levels never reported in past Ebola outbreaks, and NGOs and the United Nations could not alone implement the WHO Global Road Map to fight the spreading and unpredictable outbreak.
Any military assets and personnel sent to the region should not be used for quarantine, containment, or crowd control measures because forced quarantines have created fear and unrest, rather than stem the spread of the virus, MSF said.
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