At the rate things are going, WHO said about $987.8 million is needed for the current Ebola containment mission. This included health workers’ fees, supplies’ acquisitions and laboratory works such as tracing people who had been exposed to thevirus. While $23.8 million will be needed to pay burial teams and buy body bags.
“We requested about $100 million a month ago and now it is $1 billion, so our ask has gone up 10 times in a month,” David Nabarro, the UN’s Ebola co-ordinator, said during a briefing in Geneva. “Because of the way the outbreak is advancing, the level of surge we need to do is unprecedented, it is massive.”
In a responsible scenario, we attack diseases when their cost of eradication is minimal. The work however has changed, the cost of eradication must make an economic sense for investments into cures. Is it an irony? At this rate, by the end of the year, Ebola actions will exceed double digit billions, and you’d ask yourself, what are the leaders voted into African leadership seeing as priority? What is the world waiting for?
