CONAKRY, (Reuters) – Guinea plans to fight its deadly Ebola outbreak by drafting graduating medical students for national service and enlisting retired doctors and nurses, said Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, during a visit to West Africa to see how the global response is failing to stop the deadly disease.
Power, who will also visit Sierra Leone and Liberia, said she had a “very robust” discussion with Guinea’s President Alpha Conde yesterday about the way forward and that Conde has “tremendous impatience … wholly appropriate to the cause.”
Conde told Power of ambitious plans to increase the number of Ebola Treatment Units (ETUs) across the country.
“But it’s a real mystery as to where the healthcare workers are going to come from to staff those ETUs,” Power told Reuters.
“So he described his own recruitment drive within Guinea in order to get medical students as they come out of their training to go right into Ebola treatment as a kind of national service, also to bring all the retired doctors and nurses back and conscripting them,” she said.
The three West African countries are bearing the brunt of the worst outbreak of the hemorrhagic fever on record, which the World Health Organization (WHO) says has killed nearly 5,000 people. A small number of cases have also been reported in Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Spain and the United States.
“We are not on track right now to bend the curve,” Power told Reuters. “I will take what I know and I learn and obviously provide it to President Obama, who’s got world leaders now on speed dial on this issue.” “Hopefully the more specific we can be in terms of what the requirements are and what other countries could usefully do, the more resources we can attract,” she said.
The United Nations said last month almost $1 billion was needed to fight Ebola for the next six months. According to the U.N. Financial Tracking Service, nearly $500 million has been committed and $280 million in non-binding pledges made.
“As we have seen, along with Spain, it is not a virus that is going to remain contained within these three affected countries if we don’t deal with it at its source,” Power said. Aid groups on the ground said more doctors, nurses and treatment centers were needed. Ebola patients were being turned away due to a lack of beds and were usually cared for at home, where they risked infecting more people, according to aid workers. Power also met with aid and other groups as well as leaders of the Muslim and Catholic communities.
BED, MEDICAL STAFF SHORTAGES
According to the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI), even if existing international commitments are met by December, there could be a shortage of over 6,000 beds across Sierra Leone and Guinea.
Nearly half of the beds currently planned in the three countries will lack the medical staff needed to support them, a study by AGI, former British prime minister Tony Blair’s London-based development consultancy found.
