Ebola exposes West Africa's pre-existing public health woes
/The Ebola virus has killed more than 2,400 people in four West African countries — spreading from Guinea to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria — in what the World Health Organization on Tuesday called an outbreak “unparalleled in modern times.” The United Nations, meanwhile, says it needs $1 billion to contain the outbreak before it infects up to 20,000 people and kills roughly half of those potential victims.
But public health experts say that containing the virus is only part of a wider health crisis facing West Africa, a region where most childhood deaths are caused by preventable or curable afflictions like malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia.
As already limited resources are diverted towards stopping the spread of Ebola, a dire shortage of medical workers and a generalized climate of fear surrounding the outbreak may be preventing people from getting treatment for equally deadly, but perhaps more readily treatable, diseases.
“Ebola’s ripple effects are extending to everything else, from children unable to receive care for malaria to women unable to deliver babies in a hospital,” said Andrew Maccalla, of the medical aid organization Direct Relief, in a commentary for the Huffington Post. Preventable ailments like typhoid and dysentery, meanwhile, “might be killing more West Africans than Ebola,” he added.
Much of the problem is due to underfunded, understaffed health systems, whose deficiencies have been exacerbated by the Ebola crisis.
