Mark Zuckerberg and his wife stepped up with a $25 million donation to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Bill and Melinda Gates gave $50 million. The United States and U.K. have shelled out over $200 million each, and Germany, France and Australia have given millions as well.
But despite donations, Ebola is still "out of control" according to relief group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders.
Christopher Stokes, who leads MSF's Ebola team, told the BBC that the influx of cash is encouraging, "but it is not having any significant impact on the epidemic and it won't now for maybe another month or month and a half."
MSF has grown its personnel from 650 people in August to 3,000 currently, and runs the lion's share of beds in treatment facilities — about 700 out of 1,000 — in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
Stokes says that's not nearly enough. So far the disease has killed about 4,500 people, primarily in West Africa, according to figures from the WHO, and cases of infection are around 9,000.
"We have increased our capacity a lot," Brice de le Vingne, director of operations for MSF, told Reuters. "Now we have reached our ceiling." MSF is now calling for other aid groups to step in.
"They are deploying as we speak, but we still don't see the results on the field," de le Vingne said. "The speed of the deployment is still lower than the speed of the epidemic, and that is problematic."
Ebola treatment is delicate, dangerous work that requires intense training. At an MSF training camp in Brussels, doctors, nurses and psychologists readying to enter
Ebola field hospitals wore rubber aprons and face masks and learned to carefully remove layers from a thick protective suit and wash their gloves in disinfectant, according to Reuters.
Despite protocols, one MSF worker from Norway was diagnosed with Ebola earlier this month.
"I'm a bit scared of what I will be seeing, because I know that there's a lot of human suffering that I will be witnessing, and I'm also scared for our staff," psychologist Carla Uriarte, a psychologist with MSF, said to Reuters.
Calls for more aid have been made in recent days by President Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made another urgent plea on Thursday, seeking $1 billion for an Ebola trust fund.
So far the trust fund had only received $100,000 from Colombia, though 2 million has been pledged, according to the BBC.
Email: laneanderson@deseretnews.com
