West Africa: Ebola Crisis - Is the World Up to the Challenge?

By Richard Walker

Washington — As the US and the world step up their efforts against the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the institutions and practices they rely on are being called into question.
September has been a month of US action on Ebola. President Barack Obama announced he was sending 3,000 troops to Liberia, where they would set up a regional command, build treatment facilities and help train medical workers. The Department of Health & Human Services awarded a $25 million contract to fast-track the development of a promising experimental treatment, ZMapp. And the US called an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council - the first ever to be held on a public health crisis.
UN firsts
There was also a first from the United Nations itself in the form of the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response. Never before had
the world organization launched an emergency health mission. Countries around the world scrambled to announce their own new measures.
All this came as experts gave their grimmest warnings yet of the severity of the crisis. The US Center for Disease Control said that without appropriate action, the number of infections in Liberia and Sierra Leone alone could leap from about 20,000 to 1.4 million by late January 2015. With cases doubling every three weeks, it was a projection of ruthless, relentless mathematics.
Too late?
Amid the promises of action, there is frustration that the mathematics has been allowed to get even this far. Especially vocal is aid group Doctors Without Borders (MSF) - which has more than 3,000 staff battling the crisis. Speaking at a special meeting during the UN General Assembly, MSF President Joanne Liu said, "Generous pledges of aid and unprecedented UN resolutions are very welcome. But they will mean little, unless they are translated into immediate action. Today, Ebola is winning."
Going slow
Increasingly, attention is focusing on the shortfalls of the response so far - not just in the immediate crisis, but stretching back years. Bloomberg Businessweek reported that the drug ZMapp, now attracting funds and fanfare over its use to treat two US volunteers in Liberia, has been stuttering through the development pipeline since at least 2005 - and is based on simple technology that has been around for decades.
Global health expert Yanzhong Huang of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York told DW he was "puzzled" by the slow progress - especially in the light of concern at the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security about the potential use of viruses like Ebola in bioterrorist attacks. "I'm sure that if they had a strong interest - given all the money and research expertise that this country has - I'm sure that they would have had something by now."
New models of innovation?
Part of the issue: the dizzying array of US agencies with an interest in infectious diseases - in both the defense and health-care arms of government. But the fundamental problem is that fighting Ebola doesn't make money. As Huang puts it, "biopharmaceutical firms really do not have an interest in developing a drug because it doesn't make a profit."
MSF says "new models of innovation" are urgently needed - especially in the search for a vaccine. Spokesman Tim Shenk told DW, "Incentives such as "push" funding - up-front grants, for example - and initiatives such as a large cash prize or an advance purchase commitment could be used to incentivize researchers and companies to work on developing and marketing an Ebola vaccine. R&D should be as open-source as possible, with data and information transparent and widely available in the public domain."