With international response to the Ebola outbreak gathering pace, the United Nations says the country needs far more than it has lined up. Magdy Martinez-Soliman, the Assistant Secretary General in UNDP in charge of support to UN country offices, says the country needs 3,000 medics to be able to deal with the current outbreak. He sat with Politico for this interview:
Politico: Why are you here?
Martinez-Soliman: I am here to support the country offices in the Ebola zone. We have been for a week between Guinea and Sierra Leone. We are moving over to Monrovia to see the situation in Liberia and we have been discussing with the authorities, civil societies with the first responders and are basically repurposing the entire programme of UNDP to support UNMEER, the United Nations Mission for the Emergency Ebola Response .
Umaru Fofana: Obviously there is an escalation in international response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, but do you think the aid effort is moving fast enough?
Magdy Martinez-Soliman: No, I heard the president tell me that in his view the transmission was moving faster than the response and I think he is right on that and we are however scaling up. And now there is nothing holding back. It's really getting up to speed. You can feel it. You can see the movement. You can see that the statements are being followed by action and for the UN it's clearly action time.
Politico: Clearly action time, you say. What are the obstacles that are besetting all of this?
Martinez-Soliman: Obstacles of all kind. Actually the one I would describe as major is the dimension of the epidemic. It's spreading so fast and it is everywhere. And it is very difficult to detect; even more difficult to control; and very, very complicated to trace. So the characteristics of the epidemic make the fight against it very complicated. And if you add to that that this is a very complex crisis - you add to the health crisis, the impact it's having on the economy, on the poor households, on people who are vulnerable, well you have all the ingredients of a very complex fight ahead of us.
Politico: And people are saying that the most important things needed right now are: one, treatment centers to be set up, and two, boots on the ground - medics to be here. What is your effort towards this?
Martinez-Soliman: We are trying to support the immediate arrival of the centres. Yesterday we were discussing with the Cuban doctors who have been doing the logistics of deployment with WHO. We have been discussing also with the first line responders like the Emergency - the Italian international NGO that is having one of the treatment centres here next to Freetown. The difficulty right now is to get the personnel not in the tens, not even in the hundreds but in the thousands. The estimate for the needs of Sierra Leone is about 3,000 health workers that as a surge are right now needed and obviously mobilising 3,000 people who are qualified, who have been trained or who can be quickly trained is not an easy task.
Politico: And time seems to be running out. Lots of people are dying - more than 4,000 now have died in the region. How quickly can those be here and in Liberia and in Guinea?
Martinez-Soliman: Well they should be here already. We are simply running against the clock. I think the sooner the better. Ehhh, there is no good answer to your question. We need to just get them on planes, get them trained, get them here as fast as we can. I think there are good signs - there is good south-south cooperation from other African countries showing up. We heard yesterday how Uganda and even the people in DRC were going to support through nurses who have experience in treating patients with Ebola in their countries. This is a quite notable situation that has changed the landscape of development corporation. You have next to somebody of the United States aide a Chinese lab technician; you have next to a Russian volunteer a Cuban doctor; and next to a Norwegian logistics expert a South Africa pilot who is taking us here. It is really an international concerted effort and it's coming now big time
Politico: Coming now big time, you say. President Johnson-Sirleaf says she needs them yesterday. President Koroma says the same thing - boots on the ground. Now we still do not have any timeline. When will those be here?
Martinez-Soliman: Well, again the good news is that UNMEER is already here. There are already boots on the ground. The United Nations system has upped its game. The people who were in the countries have just left aside whatever it was they were doing else and are providing there assets - the money that we have in countries, the time that we have, the people we have - just to put themselves at the service of the national response to Ebola. So I think the boots are here and more boots are coming
Politico: Thank you, Magdy.
Martinez-Soliman: Thank you.
(C) Politico 16/10/14
