World Bank president: Ebola response ‘disastrously inadequate’

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US President Barack Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with Jim Yong Kim (centre) shortly after Obama nominated Kim for president of the World Bank on March 23, 2012. PHOTO | WIN McNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES/AFP 

By DANIEL FLYNN and TIM COCKS

In Summary

• World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said Western healthcare facilities would easily be able to contain the disease.
• “Many are dying needlessly,” read the editorial, co-written by Harvard University professor Paul Farmer.

The world's “disastrously inadequate response” to West Africa's Ebola outbreak means many people are dying needlessly, the head of the World Bank said on Monday, as Nigeria confirmed another case of the virus.

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World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said Western healthcare facilities would easily be able to contain the disease, and urged wealthy nations to share the knowledge and resources to help African countries tackle it.

“The crisis we are watching unfold derives less from the virus itself and more from deadly and misinformed biases that have led to a disastrously inadequate response to the outbreak,” Kim wrote in an editorial published in the Washington Post.

“Many are dying needlessly,” read the editorial, co-written by Harvard University professor Paul Farmer, with whom Kim founded Partners in Health, a charity that works for better healthcare in poorer countries.

READ: SISSEY: The mass hysteria linked to Ebola is exaggerated.

In a vivid sign of the danger posed by inadequate health provision, a man escaped from an Ebola quarantine centre in Monrovia on Monday and sent people fleeing in fear as he walked through a market in search of food, a Reuters witness said.

The patient, who wore a tag showing he had tested positive for Ebola, held a stick and threw stones at a doctor from the centre in the Paynesville neighbourhood who stood at a distance and tried to persuade him to give himself up.

At one point, he stumbled and fell, apparently weakened by illness. Healthcare workers wearing protective clothing forced him into a medical vehicle and returned him to the facility.

“We told the Liberian government from the beginning that we do not want an Ebola camp here. Today makes it the fifth Ebola patient coming outside vomiting,” said a man who watched the scene. Another witness said patients at the treatment centre did not receive enough food.

Ebola can only be transmitted by contact with the bodily fluids of a sick person, but rigorous measures are required for its containment. There is no proven cure, though work on experimental vaccines has been accelerated.

“Dangerous moment”

More than 1,500 people have been killed in West Africa in the worst outbreak since the disease was discovered in 1976 near the Ebola River in what is now Democratic Republic of Congo. More than 3,000 people, mostly in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, have been infected.

Poor healthcare provision has exacerbated the challenge. Liberia had just 50 doctors for its 4.3 million people before the outbreak, and many medical workers have died of Ebola.

Shortages of basic goods, foodstuffs and medical equipment have been worsened by a decision by some airlines to stop flying to the worst hit countries. Several neighbouring states have closed their borders and many international organisations have pulled out their foreign staff.

The World Health Organisation said last week that casualty figures may be up to four times higher than reported, and that up to 20,000 people may be affected before the outbreak ends.