West Africa Ebola costs put at $US81b

GENEVA: An Ebola outbreak that ravaged Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia in 2014 cost their economies an estimated $US53 billion($NZ81.26 million), according to a study in this month’s Journal of Infectious Diseases.

The study aimed to combine the direct economic burden and the indirect social impact to generate a comprehensive cost of the outbreak, which was the worst in the world.

The outbreak ran from 2013 to 2016 and killed at least 11,300 people, more than all other known Ebola outbreaks combined.

The report’s authors, Caroline Huber, Lyn Finelli and Warren Stevens, put the economic costs at $US14 billion and said the human cost was even greater, based on the people affected and a dollar figure that reflected the value of each human life.

The total is far higher than previous estimates. In October 2014, the World Bank said the Ebola epidemic could cost $US32.6 billion by the end of 2015 in a worstcase scenario, but by November 2014 it dialled back that forecast to $US3 billion to $US4 billion. In 2016 the World Bank estimate of economic loss was $US2.8 billion.

The 2003 severe acute respir atory syndrome cost an estimated $US40 billion, while the 201516 Zika virus outbreak in the Americas was estimated to have caused $US20 billion in social costs, the study said.

It factored in the impact on health workers, longterm conditions suffered by 17,000 Ebola survivors, and costs of treatment, infection control, screening and deployment of personnel beyond West Africa. — Reuters