A man wearing a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) t-shirt shows a placard to raise awareness on the symptoms of the Ebola virus yesterday to students of the Sainte Therese school, in the Koumassi district, Abidjan, on the first day of the school year.
DPA/Brussels
The fight against Ebola shifted up a notch yesterday as the European Union, African Union (AU) and the US revealed plans to train, support and deploy more health volunteers to affected regions of West Africa.
The African Union was preparing to send a team of 30 health workers and other specialists to Liberia, the country hardest hit by the epidemic.
The European Union was working on a new system of medical evacuations to encourage health workers to travel to West Africa to help.
And the US government will in October start training doctors and nurses planning to volunteer so they can “work safely and efficiently”.
The moves came days after the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that more international medical workers are needed to fight the outbreak of the haemorrhagic fever that has killed more than 2,400 people.
“If we want to send European health workers to West Africa, where they are very much needed, we must reassure them that we are able to bring them back to Europe,” EU Health Commissioner Tonio Borg said. “Otherwise, most of them will not want to go.”
Ministers and other high-level officials “agreed to launch work without delay on developing a European co-ordination mechanism for medical evacuations”, Borg said in a statement with Development Commissioner Andris Piebalgs and Humanitarian Aid Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva.
“To transport people, however, you need planes – military or otherwise – and equipment, and this is something that only EU member states have,” Borg said. “I, therefore, appeal to member states to consider how we can best use (their) means.”
Georgieva expressed hope that “a step forward” can be made already next week when EU health ministers meet for informal talks in Milan.
The AU volunteers, who are set to be deployed from Wednesday, are epidemiologists, clinicians, public health specialists and communications personnel.
A second batch of volunteers is to be deployed to Sierra Leone in the next few weeks, the union said in a statement.
“This is the time for Africa to show solidarity with the affected countries,” said its commissioner for social affairs, Mustapha Sidiki Kaloko.
In Atlanta, Georgia, the US government’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it would run three-day courses modelled on the experience of the international aid organisation Doctors Without Borders.
They will be offered from October 5 to January 4.
President Barack Obama plans to visit CDC operations today to throw a spotlight on US efforts to combat the outbreak.
In Brussels, Georgieva said that EU members had made “significant” financial and in-kind commitments towards the Ebola response.
Georgieva did not disclose a figure for the financial commitments, saying that some governments still had to finalise their contributions, which should happen in time for talks in New York this week on Ebola that are due at the annual UN General Assembly, which gets under way today.
The EU’s executive, the European Commission, has so far contributed €149mn ($192mn) to help fight the outbreak.
The US government has donated more than $100mn to the fight, with an additional $88mn pending before Congress.
Earlier this month, the WHO estimated that $600mn in aid is needed to control the epidemic if transmission of the lethal virus is to be shut down within the next six to nine months.
But the international community is “behind the curve” on the crisis, Georgieva said.
“When the warning signs were there, it took some time for the world community to pay attention, so very precious weeks have been lost, but now we recognise the magnitude of the crisis,” she said.
The WHO has warned that 20,000 people could end up being infected with Ebola before the outbreak is contained.
Malaysia sends gloves
Malaysia will send more than 20mn medical rubber gloves to five African nations stricken by the Ebola virus.
Malaysia, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of the items, said that it would dispatch 11 containers, each containing 1.9mn gloves, to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“The prime minister is concerned about the outbreak of Ebola and the lives it has claimed,” the office of Premier Najib Razak said. “We hope this contribution will prevent the spread of Ebola and save lives.”
