“It’s disappointing that we have a new case in Liberia, but we have to be careful not to be alarmist”, said Jens Pedersen, Humanitarian Affairs Advisor for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), speaking to the Daily Maverick.
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Among the major new pledges were $745 million from the African Development Bank, $495 million from the European Union, $360 million from the Islamic Development Bank, $340 million from Britain and $266 million from the United States.
The discovery of a new case in Liberia was a major setback in the fight against the worst outbreak of Ebola, which killed over11,200 people across West Africa.
“The world as a whole has a great stake in how we together respond to this global threat”, Johnson-Sirleaf told the pledging conference.
Liberia had planned for an Ebola reemergence, and its incident management system immediately sent a team to conduct a detailed investigation, the World Health Organization said, adding that United Nations and aid groups are still in Liberia to help and that it has sent additional experts to help curb new transmission.
She stressed that in an inter-connected world, “virus diseases, just like terrorism, know no national boundaries”.
Guinea’s president Alpha Conde called for debt cancelation for the three countries, and Sierra Leone’s President Ernest Bai Koroma warned against complacency now that the epidemic is on the decline.
The strategy to end the outbreak is working ” but the final stretch of the response remains particularly challenging, ” he said.
In a statement released after the conference, Oxfam said, “It is now the donors’ and recipient governments’ responsibility to ensure that the promised funds are delivered in the most transparent and useful way”.
“Because the virus appears to be related to the one previously circulating in Liberia, it is unlikely that this recurrence has been caused by virus imported from infected areas of Guinea or Sierra Leone”, it said.
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Ebola probably remained latent in Liberia even after it was officially eliminated in May, health officials said yesterday, after test results showed the strain of the virus in newly detected cases closely resembled earlier infections. Either he caught the virus from a survivor of Ebola or there was some other type of transmission. Men who survive Ebola are told to refrain from sexual intercourse for several months because the virus persists in semen.
