Gert van der Hoek
In Memoriam - Editor, Senior Moderator
To Get To Zero Ebola Cases, It'll Cost A Lot: Roughly $1.5 Billion
FEBRUARY 07, 2015
"The closer you get to zero, the harder the job"
That's according to Dr. David Nabarro, who heads the U.N.'s effort against Ebola. In a new report, the agency says that while health workers have been making progress in containing the outbreak in West Africa, it will take $1.5 billion over the first half of 2015 to bring the number of cases down to zero. And the effort will require more than 67,000 national and international health care workers and experts.
"The control effort has to concentrate on getting to the very last case," Nabarro says. "Because if you don't completely eliminate it, [the virus] can always come back and cause a flare up."
Over the past months, the number of new Ebola cases in the region has beenplummeting, with 99 reported for the last week of January — the lowest since June 2014. But a jump to 124 new cases this week shows that Ebola remains a threat.
FEBRUARY 07, 2015
"The closer you get to zero, the harder the job"
That's according to Dr. David Nabarro, who heads the U.N.'s effort against Ebola. In a new report, the agency says that while health workers have been making progress in containing the outbreak in West Africa, it will take $1.5 billion over the first half of 2015 to bring the number of cases down to zero. And the effort will require more than 67,000 national and international health care workers and experts.
"The control effort has to concentrate on getting to the very last case," Nabarro says. "Because if you don't completely eliminate it, [the virus] can always come back and cause a flare up."
Over the past months, the number of new Ebola cases in the region has beenplummeting, with 99 reported for the last week of January — the lowest since June 2014. But a jump to 124 new cases this week shows that Ebola remains a threat.