Cuban communists aid WHO in Ebola battle

Fidel Castro

NEW YORK – In a teleconference from Geneva, WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan thanked Cuba's minister of public health, Roberto Morales Ojeda, for throwing the U.N.'s health organization a lifeline in its attempt to combat the expanding Ebola outbreak West Africa.

Cuba has pledged to send 62 doctors and 103 nurses to Sierra Leone in October. Liberia has the most Ebola cases and deaths.

The new contingent of Cuban health-care professionals will join a Cuban "medical brigade" of 23 workers already stationed in Sierra Leone.

"Our participation in facing Ebola in West Africa is not an isolated event," Morales said.

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"It is part of support and solidarity that Cuba has provided in these 55 years of revolution in areas such as education, sports, culture, science and particularly in the field of health under the principle of not giving what is left over but of sharing what we have," he said.

Morales stressed Cuba's commitment to provide international health-care assistance derived from the nation's revolutionary socialist ideology.

"Only one year after the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1960, the first international medical aid was offered to Chile to take care of victims of an earthquake," he noted. "On May 23, 1963, the first Cuban medical brigade left for Chile consisting of 55 collaborators to provide their services for a year."

He emphasized the political nature of Cuba's commitment to provide international health-care workers in Third World emergency situations.

"In the 1970s, this solidarity collaboration was brought into Latin America, Africa and Asia; and in 1998, with the hurricanes George and Mitch in the Caribbean and Central America, Cuba's Health Comprehensive Program started a program where more than 25,000 health-care professionals have been involved in 32 countries."

Cuba leads in supplying personnel

Under questioning from reporters, Chan admitted Cuba's is "the largest offer of doctors, nurses and other specialists, like infectious disease control specialists and epidemiologists" that the WHO has received so far. It surpasses what has been offered by the United States, the European Union or China.

Chan's comments at the press conference telegraphed her concern the WHO effort to expedite international health-care assistance to West Africa might be a case of too little, too late.

"In the three hardest hit countries, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the number of new cases is moving far faster than the capacity to manage them in the Ebola-specific treatment centers," Chan said.

She said the death toll from Ebola in West Africa has now exceeded 2,400.

"In Liberia, an Ebola treatment facility set up jointly by the World Health Organization and the Ministry of Health was recently set up to manage 30 patients but had more than 70 patients as soon as it opened," she continued.

"Today, there is not one single bed available for the treatment of an Ebola patient in the entire country of Liberia."

Chan admitted WHO is lagging behind Ebola in the race to claim West Africa.

"The Ebola outbreak that is ravaging parts of West Africa is the largest, most severe and complex in the nearly four-decade history of this disease," she said.

"The number of new cases is moving faster than the capacity to treat them. We need to surge at least three to four times to catch up with the outbreaks."

Chan said a typical 70-to-80 bed Ebola treatment center needs about 200 doctors and nurses and other health-care workers to clean the patients as well as manage waste.

"And within that '200 formulation,' we need roughly a ratio of 20-to-80, with 20 percent from foreign countries who provide training, supervision and also management of the centers, with the local workers constituting 80 percent of the team," Chan said. "So, if we need 10 treatment centers, then we will 2,000 health-care workers, and if we need eight, then we need 1,600 health-care workers configured this way."

Calculating these numbers, Chan admitted the WHO urgently needed at least 500 to 600 foreign health-care professionals sent to West Africa immediately. An additional 1,000 local heath workers recruited by the West African countries to manage the existing Ebola health-care facilities will be needed as well as the additional facilities under construction.

Deaths likely underestimated

Pressed by reporters, Chan conceded the WHO estimate of 20,000 deaths resulting from the current West African epidemic was based on statistical models with assumptions that might change.

"You asked a question whether or not the estimate of 20,000 is out of date," she commented. "Well, let me reinforce what I have been saying. That was an estimate by modeling, but if the situation changes the number, of course, will change."

She also acknowledged that any WHO statistical tallies of deaths resulting from the current Ebola outbreak are likely to be underestimated.

"We are also very cognizant of the fact that whatever number of cases and deaths we are reporting is an underestimate. To get the actual number, we need very good bottom-up reporting from the districts and from the government, itself. So, we are now working with the Centers for Disease Control in the United States to get data management assistance to improve our ability to collect more accurate data as we move along."

As WND reported Friday, an econometric simulation model based on the assumption the WHO and others will be unable to control the outbreak predicts 1.2 million people will die from the disease in the next six months, the minimum time the WHO projects will be necessary to contain the epidemic.

In his analysis, econometrics research assistant Francis Smart of Michigan State University took seriously the conclusions of Canadian researchers who proved that the strain of Ebola West Africa could go airborne and be transmitted between humans through breathing.

Smart took exception with the WHO prediction the West Africa outbreak could afflict more than 20,000 people before it could be brought under control. He is concerned WHO has underestimated the true horror of the outbreak by assuming its response will be well-funded, fully-staffed and effective.

"Liberia is significantly behind other nations in its ability to diagnose Ebola," he concluded from a detailed analysis of the data emerging from the West African outbreak.

"This and the well-known lack of medical facilities suggests to me that as the crisis escalates the ability of Liberia to maintain any sense of order and with it any hope of controlling the spread of the disease is likely to degrade," he said.

"If this is the case, then it is quite possible that even this horrifying projection is an underestimate of the pain and carnage likely to result from this outbreak."

WND reported Thursday Dr. Peter Piot, the co-discoverer of the Ebola virus, in an editorial published in the current issue of Science magazine warned the outbreak has created a "perfect storm." He cites dysfunctional health services from decades of war, low public trust in government and Western medicine, traditional beliefs, denials of the existence of the virus and burial practices that include contact with Ebola-infected corpses.

In his editorial, Dr. Piot is extremely critical of the current international response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. He charges that West African governments and the international community "have been slow to act in a way commensurate to a major threat to health, economies, and societal stability."

He pointed out it took nearly four months after the first patient died in December 2013 before the outbreak was confirmed as being caused by the Ebola virus. The WHO and concerned governments waited until August before declaring the epidemic a public health emergency, despite multiple warnings by Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders.

Without an immediate step-up in international health-care efforts, Piot warned the West Africa outbreak risks becoming a pandemic that could devastate Africa and spread globally.