Ebola is an ‘urgent lesson’ for world

N’DJAMENA: Arriving airline passengers lined up outdoors to have their temperatures checked. Some of them had travelled through a West African country affected by Ebola or sat next to passengers who did. Chadian authorities weren’t taking any chances.

Impoverished countries like Chad know the only way to stay Ebola-free is to keep infected people out. These countries’ health-care systems are unprepared to handle an outbreak, according to a report released yesterday by Save the Children.

The report said only Somalia was worse prepared than Chad for an epidemic. The charity urged the international community to improve health care in developing countries so they could tackle any threat.

After causing nearly 10 000 recorded deaths, the Ebola epidemic is waning in the three worst-hit countries – Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

“We must learn lessons from this crisis urgently,” the report said.

The organisation looked at the 75 countries with the highest levels of child mortality and analysed how much they spent on health as well as how many doctors and nurses they had, among other factors.

It found that 28 countries were worse off than Liberia, which has seen the most deaths from the Ebola epidemic that began in December 2013.

Somalia, ravaged by decades of civil war and an Islamic insurgency, finished last.

The second worse off is Chad, where there is only one health worker for every 4 444 people. Rounding out the most vulnerable countries were Nigeria, Afghanistan, Haiti, Ethiopia, Central African Republic, Guinea, Niger, Mali and Guinea-Bissau.

The charity said efforts to combat Ebola had cost $4.3 billion (R50bn), while it would have taken $1.58bn to improve health care in the affected countries. – Sapa-AP