Gains made in the global fight against Ebola, but more must be done: US envoy
US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power praises enhanced response to deadly outbreak during visit to West Africa but cautions against complacency
US envoy Samantha Power said she will return from West Africa to the United States and the United Nations on Thursday with a message of “hope and possibility” that the global response to the Ebola outbreak is working, but more resources are needed.
Speaking to reporters after visiting the three worst-affected countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, Power said among several areas to focus on was removing the stigma of the deadly haemorrhagic disease in those countries and around the world.
“What we are doing is working.”
Ebola survivors in West Africa have been shunned, while Australia has banned visas for citizens of the three countries and several US states have imposed a mandatory quarantine on health care workers returning from the region.
“It is quite literally the most heartbreaking form of ailment that any community could ever go through where you cannot care for your loved ones,” the US Ambassador to the United Nations said. “The only thing worse than losing a child is not being able to hold the child that you’re losing. It’s mind-blowing.”
She said recently established command and control centres in the capitals of Liberia and Sierra Leone – bringing together the governments, the United Nations, foreign countries taking a lead in the response and aid groups – were proving successful.
The coordination was “a sight to behold,” said Power.
In Freetown, Sierra Leone, the rate of safe burials of the highly contagious bodies of Ebola victims had risen from 30 per cent to 98 per cent in the few days a burial command centre had been in operation, while in Liberia a mobile laboratory in a remote area had cut testing times from five days to five hours.
“It’s a great privilege to be able to bring back that sense of hope and possibility to the United States and to the UN Now the message is, ‘What we are doing is working,’” she said.
“What we have is not enough, but we know from our interventions that they can have these pronounced speedy effects. So now we can say you have opportunity to be a part of a winning enterprise,” Power said of her bid to convince more countries to join the response efforts.
Power said it was important that command and control centres were now in place in regional areas in all three countries.
She said lessons could be learned and shared from the responses in each country. In Guinea, the national response centre in Conakry was a couple of conference rooms with few resources and UN officials were based elsewhere in the city.
As hundreds of millions of dollars is spent on tackling the outbreak, the World Health Organisation said on Wednesday that Liberia may be seeing a decline in the spread of the virus, though the battle is far from won.
“Given the unpredictability of the epidemic, the risk of having excess capacity on the ground and available is a risk well worth taking,” said Andy Weber, deputy head of the US State Department’s Ebola Coordination Unit.
“We can’t stop the work to get as many of the required ETUs [Ebola Treatment Units] in place, to have them geographically dispersed so they’re accessible to as many potential patients as possible,” said Weber, who travelled to West Africa with Power.
Power will speak at the German Marshall Fund in Brussels on Thursday. She says more countries need to step-up to help fight the disease that has killed 5,000 people mainly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea since March, with a handful of cases in Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, Spain and the United States.
The epidemic remains at a scale and severity the world has never seen before, said Power, who spoke as she travelled to Brussels from West Africa.
“It will be something people talk about generations from now. There are these historical challenges that arise. Sometimes it’s the violence that one country commits against another, or atrocities against civilians. It could be a tsunami. Here it is the worst public health emergency in history,” she said.
“People will ask, ‘Where were you when Ebola tried to wipe out communities in West Africa?’”
