Spread of Ebola in West Africa outpaces resources
ByJonathan LaPook
CBS News
September 26, 2014
The U.S. is sending 3,000 military personnel to build 17 treatment facilities in the weeks ahead, but there’s only a handful there now.
The military eventually hopes to provide 1700 new beds for patients and train up to 500 local health care workers each week.
Dr. Paul Farmer co-founded Partners in Health, an organization that helps build health care systems in developing nations. He was recently in Liberia and met with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
There seems to be a disconnect in numbers of hundreds of thousands of people being infected, and the possibility of 1700 more treatment beds.
“Seventeen-hundred more treatment beds does not seem like a lot to me, when you’re talking about a potential need of that scale, so I think there is a mismatch in the math,” said Farmer.
But even if there were enough supplies, Farmer says much more needs to be done to bring the Ebola epidemic under control in a region with broken health care.
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