Obama Speaks About Ebola Epidemic President Obama on Thursday called for an urgent and coordinated international response to the Ebola crisis while speaking at the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Seeking to speed the response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, President Obama delivered a blunt warning on Thursday at a high-level United Nations meeting devoted to the health crisis: The world was doing too little and moving too slowly.
Mr. Obama cited his announcements last week that the Pentagon would build a field hospital and treatment units in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone — along with the establishment of a United Nations emergency mission to respond to the Ebola outbreak — as positive steps.
“But I want us to be clear: We are not moving fast enough. We are not doing enough,” the president said. “There is still a significant gap between where we are and where we need to be.”
Mr. Obama called on countries to supply air transportation and medical evacuation services, as well as doctors and medical equipment. The United States, he said, could build a network of treatment centers but did not have enough doctors by itself to contain the outbreak.
The initial American response to the outbreak had been criticized for being slow-footed and inadequate. But Mr. Obama clearly felt emboldened to prod others to do more, having visited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta last week, where he announced a new military command in Liberia with about 3,000 doctors and other personnel, and plans to build 17 Ebola treatment centers.
On Wednesday, Mr. Obama cast the American response to Ebola as one of a series of global challenges in which the United States was taking the lead. A day later, he modified his prepared remarks to take less credit for the American relief effort and to put more pressure on other countries not to use that response as a reason not to act.
“We will not stop, we will not relent until we halt this epidemic, once and for all,” Mr. Obama said. “But I hope I’m properly communicating the sense of urgency here. Do not stand by thinking that somehow because of what we’ve done, it’s taken care of. It’s not.”
“If we move fast, even if imperfectly,” he added, “that could mean the difference between 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 deaths versus hundreds of thousands or even a million deaths.
Mr. Obama and his fellow leaders heard a stark message from doctors on the front lines of the outbreak. They described wholesale panic, with desperate patients, angry family members, infection rates doubling every three weeks, and the collapse of public health systems, which has led to outbreaks of other deadly diseases like malaria.
Joanne Liu, the international president of Doctors Without Borders, said her organization’s hospital in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, opened for only 30 minutes each morning, rapidly filling the few beds that become free overnight because of the deaths.
“The sick continue to be turned away, only to return home and spread the virus among loved ones and neighbors,” she said. “The isolation centers you have promised must be established now.”
Doctors Without Borders is calling for a centralized system that can be used when an aid worker from abroad falls sick, so they can be safely evacuated no matter their nationality.
Sierra Leone’s president, Ernest Bai Koroma, addressing the meeting by videoconference from his country, appealed for the lifting of bans by airlines on commercial flights to and from the region. He also asked for more treatment centers, labs, and equipment, as well as training for the overwhelmed health workers in his country.
Mr. Koroma explained how his government had locked down the entire country for three days — forbidding people to leave their houses — so it could send out thousands of volunteers to assess the spread of the disease. The survey found the situation was worse than expected.
The United Nations secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, who convened the meeting, said that contributions of member states “are falling significantly short of the twentyfold surge that is required.”
One of the key shortfalls, United Nations officials and aid workers have said, is the urgent need for countries to agree to transport and treat aid workers who become infected. The United Nations emergency mission, which is based in Accra, Ghana, and is headed by Anthony Banbury, is preparing to deploy personnel to the region this weekend.
Beyond the immediate challenge, Mr. Ban said, the United Nations should consider creating a corps of health workers, modeled on the United Nations peacekeeping forces, who could be deployed to countries on short notice to combat such outbreaks.
“Just as our troops in blue helmets help keep people safe,” Mr. Ban said, “a corps in white coats could help keep people safe.”
The World Bank announced that it would double its funding for fighting the disease, to $400 million. The International Crisis Group, an independent nonprofit organization, has called for an urgent donor meeting, warning that failing to contain Ebola could send already fragile West Africa into renewed instability.
“The question is really how fast things are put in place,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, an economist and the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, who attended the meeting.
“This is an epidemic that can be brought under control quickly if facilities and health workers and protocols are in place,” Mr. Sachs said. “These numbers of one million and two million — those are if the epidemic just runs out of control.”
The biggest message out of the meeting, he said, is that the deployment of resources, including health workers, and the construction of treatment centers, need to be done quickly.
Margaret Chan, a Hong Kong physician who is the director-general of the World Health Organization, said that because the response had lagged so far behind the spread of the disease, “we should expect things to get worse before getting better.”
The United Nations warned that without stronger efforts to contain the disease, more than 20,000 people could be infected with Ebola by early November. On Thursday, in its latest update, the World Health Organization reported 6,242 cases of the disease, and 2,917 deaths, in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone !!
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