WB chief says int’l community ‘failed miserably’ in response to Ebola

PanARMENIAN.Net - The president of the World Bank, Jim Kim, admitted on Wednesday, Oct 8, that the international community had “failed miserably” in its response to the Ebola virus that has killed more than 3,800 people in west Africa and warned that the crisis now affecting Spain and the US was going to get much worse, the Guardian reports.

Amid signs that western governments were being forced to take the risks of a global pandemic more seriously, Kim said he wanted them to back a new $20bn global health fund that would be able to react instantly to emergencies.

“It’s late. It’s really late,” he said in an interview with the Guardian before the annual meeting of the Washington-based organization this weekend.

“We should have done so many things. Healthcare systems should have been built. There should have been monitoring when the first cases were reported. There should have been an organized response.”

Kim’s warning that the global community was still not “moving fast enough” came as the Ebola virus claimed its first victim in the U.S. and news of a case in Spain sent shares in travel and airline companies tumbling on stock exchanges.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said the number of deaths from Ebola in west Africa now stood at 3,879 with no evidence that the epidemic was being brought under control.

The U.S. has announced that it is scaling up its efforts and will tighten screening procedures at airports from this weekend.

In a blunt assessment of how the international community had coped with the crisis, Kim said: “We were tested by Ebola and we failed. We failed miserably in our response.”

He urged finance ministers attending meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund this weekend to provide the resources needed to treat Ebola patients in their home countries.

Under the Bank’s plan, resources would be provided to build big specialized treatment centers and to extend care to local communities. Every developed country should be prepared to send trained medical staff to west Africa, Kim said.

A World Bank study released on Wednesday showed that the economic cost of Ebola could be as high as $33bn over the next two years if the virus spreads to neighboring countries in west Africa.