Ebola death toll in west Africa ‘could be much higher than initial estimates’
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Version 0 of 1. Regional and world leaders have called on the international community to scale up their efforts to rebuild the nations devastated by Ebola amid fears the death toll from the outbreak could be even higher than previously thought. Although the epidemic, which has ravaged Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, appears to be drawing to a close, the secretary general of the Red Cross warned that the true number of victims could be substantially greater than official estimates. “Even though statistics show that over 9,000 people died of Ebola, our volunteers on the ground were called on to bury 14,000, which means that many more died from Ebola,” Mohammed El-hadj Assy told a conference on the Ebola crisis in Brussels on Tuesday. Despite a massive aid effort, the UN operation against the disease is still facing a $900m shortfall. Less than half of the $5.1bn pledged to counter the epidemic has so far been disbursed. The Liberian president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, said that recovery from the epidemic would require “significant resources, perhaps even a Marshall plan”, adding that “additional resources” would be needed from the European commission, the IMF, World Bank and African Development Bank. The original suggestion for an African Marshall plan had come from the World Bank but “we would like to conceptualise it a bit more”, Johnson Sirleaf said. Primary healthcare systems might be one initial beneficiary. New Ebola cases in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone are now falling – from around 600 a week to fewer than 100, according to the UK international development secretary, Justine Greening. “I think the end is in sight,” she said on the fringes of the meeting. “But the big challenge is getting down to zero. We have to make sure that complacency doesn’t set in.” The former British foreign secretary and CEO of International Rescue Committee, David Miliband, said: “There’s a real danger of a lost decade if the lessons locally and internationally are not learned. We already have a lost year of schooling, of economic growth, and of lost confidence so we must not be rose-tinted about the challenge over the next decade.” Related: Fighting Ebola requires a culture change in the west, as well as west Africa | Peter Piot and David Miliband Despite a clear trend of declining Ebola cases, a 15 April deadline for eradicating the disease set by regional leaders is considered optimistic by many in the development community. “It is not easy to aim at the zero target,” Alpha Condé, the Guinean president, told the conference. “We will all have to scale up our efforts – and we will need all the help we can get.” Economic losses from the disease have also been enormous. The World Bank estimates foregone GDP growth in the previously dynamic economies of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone at $1.6bn this year because of the disease. The wider regional costs could be as high as $6bn. In Liberia, where only one new Ebola case was reported in the last week, thousands of children began returning to school. But more than half of those schools have no water supply. And while 57% have a toilet, it is shared by an average of 100 children. Fears about a recurrence of the disease, which is spread by contact with bodily fluids, have had to be balanced against the need to return to some sort of normality. Ebola has a 50% mortality rate and symptoms that range from vomiting and diarrhoea to internal and external bleeding. Its human cost on west Africa has been incalculable. At the height of the outbreak, Liberian burial rites, which typically involve cleaning and touching the bodies of the dead, were replaced by the mass cremations of up to a hundred bodies at a time, alienating local people and traumatising survivors. Eventually a “safe and dignified” burial process evolved, using disinfectant kits, personal protective equipment, sterilised body bags and the post-burial sanitisation of deceased persons’ homes. |