The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged $US50 million to support emergency efforts to contain West Africa’s Ebola epidemic, which has already killed almost 2,300 people in the worst outbreak of the virus in history.
The US-based philanthropic foundation said it would release funds immediately to UN agencies and international organisations to help them buy supplies and scale up the emergency response in affected countries.
It said it would also work with public and private sector partners to speed up development of drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics that could be effective in treating Ebola patients and preventing further spread of the haemorrhagic fever-causing virus.
“We are working urgently with our partners to identify the most effective ways to help them save lives now and stop transmission of this deadly disease,” the foundation’s chief executive Sue Desmond-Hellmann said in a statement.
The latest data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) showed the Ebola outbreak, which began in March, had infected almost 4,300 people so far, killing more than half of them.
The deadly viral infection is raging in three countries – Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone – and has also spread into neighbouring Nigeria and Senegal.
The WHO said earlier this week the Ebola death toll jumped by almost 200 in a single day to at least 2,296 and was already likely to be higher than that.
The organisation had previously warned that the epidemic was growing “exponentially” and there could be up to 20,000 cases in West Africa before it was brought to a halt.
Chris Elias, the head of global development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said the group would assess over coming days where the $50m pledged to support the effort against Ebola could be best spent.
Some would go to the most acute and immediate needs, he said, and some would be put towards more longer-term research into treatments and ways of preventing future outbreaks.
“The spread of this disease has really happened because of the very weak health systems in these very poor countries,” he said.
“We need to be thinking how we can build up those health services, how we train healthcare workers, and how we make sure they have the equipment they need to do their jobs.”
The Gates money comes after the British government and the Wellcome Trust medical charity last month pledged $US10.8m to speed up research on Ebola, a disease for which there is currently no licensed treatment or vaccine.
Reuters