Ebola crisis update – 21st November 2014
MSF.org
21 November 2014
Since the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was officially declared on 22 March in Guinea, it has claimed 5,420 lives in the region. The outbreak is the largest ever, and is currently affecting four countries in West Africa: Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Mali. One person in Spain and three people in the USA have recovered; one person in the USA has died. Outbreaks in Nigeria and Senegal have been declared over. A separate outbreak in DRC has also ended.
Following announcements made in the last weeks, deployment of international aid is slowly rolling out in the three main countries affected: Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. However, there is little indication that current efforts to increase capacity to isolate and take care of suspected and confirmed Ebola cases will address needs sufficiently.
Last week, MSF and three research institutions announced that clinical trials for three different treatments would be carried out at MSF sites in West Africa. The French National Institute of Health and Medical Research médicale (INSERM) will lead a trial for antiviral drug favipiravir at MSF’s facility in Guéckédou, Guinea; the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) will lead a trial of convalescent whole blood and plasma therapy at MSF’s Donka Ebola centre in Conakry, Guinea; and the University of Oxford will lead, on behalf of the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium (ISARIC), a Wellcome Trust-funded trial of the antiviral drug brincidofovir at a site yet to be determined.
The United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) has been set up and will be based in Ghana to pursue five strategic priorities: stop the spread of the disease; treat the infected; ensure essential services; preserve stability; and prevent the spread of the disease to countries currently unaffected.
MSF teams in West Africa are still seeing critical gaps in all aspects of the response, including medical care, training of health staff, infection control, contact tracing, epidemiological surveillance, alert and referral systems, community education and mobilisation.
MSF has been responding to the outbreak since March, and currently has more than 3,400 staff working in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Mali, treating an increasing number of patients. Since the response began, 24 MSF staff members have fallen ill with Ebola, 11 of whom have recovered. The vast majority of these infections were found to have occurred in the community.
Operational Highlights
MSF’s West Africa Ebola response started in March 2014 and counts activities in Guinea, Liberia, Mali and Sierra Leone. MSF currently employs 276 international and around 3,160 locally hired staff in the region. The organisation operates six Ebola case management centres (CMCs), providing approximately 600 beds in isolation, and two transit centres. Since the beginning of the outbreak, MSF has sent more than 700 international staff to the region and admitted more than 6,000 patients, among whom around 3,800 were confirmed as having Ebola. Nearly 1,600 patients have survived.
More than 1,200 tonnes of supplies have been shipped to the affected countries since March.
The provisional budget for 2014 and 2015 for MSF’s Ebola response in West Africa is €113M. So far MSF has raised €21M in institutional funds and €52M in private funds.
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