The international community is gathering in London for a conference to raise awareness about the Ebola virus.
Philip Hammond, foreign secretary, Justine Greening, development secretary, and Ernest Bai Koroma, president of Sierra Leone, will be among those taking part at the event at Lancaster House in central London.
Participating countries will discuss how the global community can provide an effective response to the crisis in West Africa. They are expected to announce pledges to support the international effort to defeat the disease, with both the UK and Sierra Leone urging them to contribute with extra funding for hospital beds and staff. Britain has already promised a further £20m to aid stretched health services in Sierra Leone on top of its existing £100m action plan.
Experts say the outbreak in West Africa has developed at an unprecedented scale with the current rate of infection standing at 1.7, meaning that for every 10 people that contract the virus a further 17 will also be infected. The aim is to get the rate down to one, and eventually below one, in the fight to stop the spread of the deadly disease.
The £20m extra aid will go towards providing medical supplies including chlorine, personal protection equipment such as masks, protection suits and gloves, and water and sanitation facilities.
It will also be used to deploy clinicians, global health experts, epidemiologists and infection control advisers from Public Health England, King’s Health Partners and the United Nations.
Greening said: “Britain is working urgently with Sierra Leone to scale up the international response to the disease.
Last month, Britain pledged to support 700 treatment beds in Sierra Leone, but keeping basic public health services running is vital to halt the spread of the disease. Our latest support will allow stretched medical staff and aid agencies to prevent further infection.”
More than 40 British military personnel and aid experts are now working in Sierra Leone following a direct request for assistance from the World Health Organisation and the country’s government.
More than 160 NHS staff are also due to travel to Sierra Leone after answering a call this month for volunteers to help fight the disease.
Doctors and scientists are racing to find a medical solution to the epidemic that is spiralling out of control. Experts believe they have a 90-day window to halt the spread of Ebola, which could otherwise have infected around 1.5 million people by January.
The number dead from the highly infectious condition, which has spread across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, has reportedly risen to more than 3,000. At least 3,700 children have lost one or both parents to the virus since the start of the outbreak, according to preliminary Unicef figures, with fears that this could have doubled by the middle of next month.
Unicef said many are also being rejected by their surviving relatives for fear of infection. Manuel Fontaine, the charity’s regional director for West and Central Africa, said: “Thousands of children are living through the deaths of their mother, father or family members from Ebola. These children urgently need special attention and support, yet many of them feel unwanted and even abandoned. Orphans are usually taken in by a member of the extended family, but in some communities, the fear surrounding Ebola is becoming stronger than family ties.”
The report came as MPs suggested that cuts in international aid to Sierra Leone and Liberia and a failure to properly supervise spending might have contributed to the spread of the disease.
In a scathing report, the Commons international development committee said the crisis “demonstrates the dangers of ignoring the least developed countries in the world” and risks wiping out the benefit of £20m of previous UK-funded work.
Aid agencies and ministers had turned their attention to higher-profile humanitarian situations elsewhere, it said, warning that aid targeting “should not be left to the whim of world media”.
The MPs accused DfID and the European Union of doing nothing to deal with the fact that tens of billions of pounds of EU-led health aid was not being passed on by Liberia’s finance ministry to deal with an “alarming lack of capacity”.
“The weak state of the health system in both countries has greatly reduced the effectiveness of the response to Ebola,” the committee concluded. “There is an alarming lack of capacity in the health system, including a shortage of skilled clinicians; 10% of Sierra Leone’s domestically trained nurses are working in the UK health system.
“We were shocked to discover that in Liberia only $3.9m (£2.4m) of $60m (£37m) EU health sector support had been passed on from the Ministry of Finance to the Ministry of Health over a two-year period, leaving the Liberian health system struggling.
“Neither the EU nor DfID seemed to be doing anything to resolve the situation. DfID has been working for the last five years on building up the Liberian health system (and have spent £20m doing so); ministers should be concerned that this work is being undone, not least because DfID provides 16% of its total budget to the EU (£1.23bn).
Sir Malcolm Bruce, the committee chairman, said the scale of the crisis “may well be connected to declining levels of international support for health system improvements in what remain two of the poorest and least developed countries in the world”.
He added: “In the midst of this devastating epidemic, and at a time when the UK has reached its 0.7% target for overseas development assistance, it is wrong for the UK to cut its support to these two countries by nearly a fifth. The planned termination of further UK funding to the Liberian health sector is especially unwise.
“The UK can be proud of the work DfID has done to help deliver many improvements in Sierra Leone and Liberia following the civil wars in both countries. We believe that this work should continue through bilateral aid programmes.
“It is also good that in the short time since our report was agreed DfID has provided extra support for Ebola and many NHS staff have volunteered to go to Sierra Leone. However, UK ministers must now work harder to track the use of sector support given to Liberia and Sierra Leone through multilaterals we help fund.
“DfID donates 16% of its total budget via the EU, so ministers must take a closer interest in where UK money is going and whether it is being spent as intended. Yet neither the EU itself nor DfID seem to be concerned about how much of the work they recently funded has been undone through this failure to distribute ongoing support.”