UN Emergency Response poised to control Ebola

The United Nations Mission on Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER), Wednesday said the curve Ebola has taken in the three most affected countries was alarming and expressed its resolve to bend the curve or end it.

Ambassador Samantha Power, United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations, said at a news conference in Accra that the affected countries had aggressively stepped up their game in an effort to bend the curve.

“We are very encouraged by the steps taken in dealing with the Ebola crisi6s,” Ms. Power said and noted that her main message was for the world to fill the gaps so “we can bend and end the curve.”

Ambassador Power travelled to different part of West Africa, including the Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, to demonstrate her country’s support for those nations and her efforts to combat the deadly disease.

The trip is also meant to draw attention to the need for increased support for the international response.

She expressed the hope that that the crisis could be turned around, saying they would work very hard to achieve it that objective.

“I am confident that with all of the international community working with the national governments, we'll make it,” she stated.

She commended Ghana for its nomination to host the UNMEER headquarters in Accra.

The head of UNMEER, Anthony Banbury, said that there had been a very significant mobilization of international personnel, resources, and capabilities to work side-by-side with the governments, and those efforts were starting to pay off.

However, he stressed that the crisis remained very serious, with continuous needs to build more beds, get more foreign medical teams in place, build more community care centres, and have more safe burial teams and more community mobilization.

With that vital imperative, Mr. Banbury said the Mission was working very hard together with partners such as the United States, all the wider UN family, non-governmental organizations and national governments “to make sure we put that response capability in place everywhere so that there are no gaps in the response.”

“At UNMEER, we are doing everything possible to achieve the results that have been set forth, the objectives that have been set of 70 per cent of new cases under treatment and 70 per cent of burials being done safely,” he said.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has said it would be sending health experts weekly to support in the campaign.

The task has been described as an extremely ambitious project whose goal was to reduce the disease within 30, 60 and 90 days with constant flow of resources from health donor countries.