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Musicmystery -> RE: Withholding care (10/27/2014 7:14:14 PM)
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And it says:
But the World Health Organization said this week that just 25 percent of the isolation beds needed to halt the disease's march through Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia are in place.
"The big gap is still in human resources," said Manuel Fontaine, head of U.N. child agency UNICEF in West Africa. "Money is necessary. It is an expensive operation."
"Building ETUs (Ebola treatments units) is the easy part, the more challenging and more dangerous part is making them run safely. To stay safe you have to think through thousands of details," said Sean Casey, who runs one such unit for the International Medical Corps in Bong County in northern Liberia.
One major issue had been the lack of guarantees that volunteers would be evacuated to Western hospitals if they fell ill. U.S. and EU officials have since guaranteed this.
Some aid workers suggest that the strategic importance of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea was not high enough to mobilize major resources until people in the United States and Europe fell ill and it became an issue in the West.
the West is not going to send a lot of its own people," Dakar-based independent West African political analyst Gilles Yabi told Reuters.
Cuba, however, has bucked the trend, with Havana training up 461 doctors and nurses so they can help fight Ebola. So far, 256 have been dispatched to West Africa.
Having been criticized for not doing enough to help while also imposing border closures and travel restrictions that have hurt Ebola-hit nations, African nations are now starting to pledge medics.
Doctors from Uganda, with years of experience fighting Ebola, are helping run a clinic in Monrovia. Congo, which has faced six outbreaks back home, is training 1,000 volunteers.
East African Nations have promised over 600 health workers and Nigeria, which has successfully contained its Ebola cases this year, has pledged 500 medics.
Ian Quick, director at Rethink Fragility, an organization that focuses on fragile states, said the Ebola response was echoing current trends international peacekeeping, where rich states provide funds but poor nations send personnel.
“It makes sense in terms of comparative advantage ... but does tend to stick in everyone's craw ethically.”
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