European Leaders Scramble to Upgrade Response to Ebola Crisis
BRUSSELS — When the Ebola
virus was first identified in March as the cause of a series of
mysterious deaths in the remote forests of Guinea, Europe moved quickly
to battle a disease that has now infected more than 7,000 Africans and
already killed around half of those. It mobilized more money and health
workers than the United States, China or anyone else for West Africa.
But,
proud of its long record as the world’s biggest donor of humanitarian
aid, Europe has since suffered a blow to its self-image of can-do
generosity. Its own efforts to contain the lethal virus have been
overshadowed by President Obama’s announcement last month that he was
sending 3,000 troops to West Africa to build hospitals and otherwise
help in the fight against Ebola.
While
a few left-wingers sneered at the American deployment as yet another
example of Washington’s taste for military intervention — and praised
Cuba for sending more than 100 doctors to West Africa — many European
officials and politicians welcomed the move and wondered why what had
been a European-led international effort to contain the virus had
clearly not worked.
Graphic: Ebola Facts: How Many Patients Are Being Treated Outside of West Africa?
Now,
with Europe grappling with the first case of Ebola transmitted on its
soil after news on Monday that a nurse in Madrid had been
infected, European leaders are scrambling to coordinate and ramp up
their response to the lethal disease. As public anxieties grow,
politicians on the far right are seizing on the Ebola crisis to demand
sharp curbs in immigration, while those on the left rail against
Europe’s colonial past and its failure to do more to help Africa contain
the virus.
Pressure to contain the epidemic has prompted European Union
officials in Brussels to start meeting daily with aid groups and
representatives from member states to discuss how to best respond to
the crisis. Europe’s emergency response unit, housed in a drab Brussels
office block, used to focus on monitoring natural disasters and wars,
but now tracks Ebola around the clock.
“Speed
is of the essence, and there is a feeling that all of us have been
behind the curve,” Claus Sorensen, director general of Humanitarian Aid
and Civil Protection, a department of the European Union’s Brussels
administration, said in an interview.
For
many months, the struggle against Ebola was a largely African and
European effort. Doctors Without Borders, which was founded in France,
set up a series of treatment centers. Its doctors and nurses stayed put
while those of some other groups, like Samaritan’s Purse of the United
States, pulled out after staff members became infected.
Doctors
Without Borders, financed by the European Union and donors, now has
nearly 300 international workers and 2,900 local employees in West
Africa, according to Christof Godderis, a spokesman for the group’s
Belgian branch, which has been at the forefront of the anti-Ebola
campaign.
Yet
the sight of American troops building clinics and unloading supplies
has been a jolt to Europe’s longstanding belief that humanitarian
assistance is a more effective tool for dealing with the problems of the
world than military might. Together with its 28 member states, the
European Union boasts of providing more than half of the global total of
humanitarian assistance.
Linda McAvan, head of the European Parliament’s
development committee, said Europe’s self-criticism is off-base. “The
U.S. is one country,” she said. “If it wants to send its military, it
can do that straight away. But the European Union does not have a
military,” she said in an interview.
Instead, the bloc has 28 separate militaries, each one controlled by its national government.
Prodded
by Mr. Obama’s Sept. 16 announcement, President François Hollande of
France announced two days later that he, too, was sending troops to West
Africa. The French soldiers will set up a hospital in the forest region
of southern Guinea where the current Ebola outbreak began last
December. Britain has ordered its military to do the same in Sierra
Leone. European officials note that, unlike the American military,
Britain and France will provide medical personnel to staff what they
build.
Europe
does not have a direct equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, the organization that has dispatched scores of
disease-control experts to West Africa. The European Center for Disease
Prevention and Control, headquartered in Sweden, coordinates the work of
health experts in different countries but does not have its own
emergency-response teams.
In
a debate in the European Parliament a day after Mr. Obama’s
announcement, politicians from across the political spectrum took the
floor to complain that Europe needed to get more directly involved in
battling Ebola in West Africa.
“Look
at the way we have managed, or rather mismanaged, this epidemic,”
Michèle Rivasi, a center-left French legislator, told the European
Assembly. Abandoning customary French suspicion of the American
military, she said that Washington was “not sending soldiers but people
who can build hospitals, and that is a good thing.” Europe, she added,
needed to step up its response.
The Parliament
passed a resolution calling for a more robust European response to the
outbreak and bemoaning “the underestimation of the crisis by the
international community.”
In
announcing the United States’ deployment, Mr. Obama was pointed in his
message that America was “prepared to take the leadership on this” but
could not fight the epidemic on its own. The White House in effect
challenged other nations to roll out a similar level of response in
Guinea and Sierra Leone, the two other nations hard hit by the disease,
which were colonies of France and Britain, respectively.
More Ebola Coverage
-
Condition of Spanish Nurse With Ebola Worsens, Officials Say
The deterioration came as the authorities announced that one more health care worker had been quarantined, in addition to three others who were isolated overnight.
-
What You Need to Know About the Ebola Outbreak
Questions and answers on the scale of the outbreak and the science of the Ebola virus.
-
Burial Boys of Ebola
In Sierra Leone, a group of young men take on the dirtiest work of the Ebola outbreak: finding and burying the dead.
-
Surviving Ebola, but Untouchable Back Home
As some survivors come back to the world of the living, they feel a chill of wariness, or worse, from neighbors.
The
pressure to stem the spread of Ebola at its roots has grown as both
Europe and the United States have encountered their own cases. A
Liberian man died on Wednesday at a Dallas hospital. A Spanish nurse who
treated a priest who had been airlifted from Sierra Leone for treatment
at a Madrid hospital is the first known case of Ebola being contracted
through exposure outside Africa.
After
months of reassuring Europeans that there was little danger of Ebola
spreading in Europe, the European Union responded with dismay and sent a
letter to the Spanish authorities asking for an explanation.
Despite
sometimes incendiary remarks by extremists like Jean-Marie Le Pen, the
founder and honorary president of France’s National Front party,
mainstream politicians have united behind support for West Africa.
“The
values we stand for as Europeans in the world, of solidarity, of
dignity and of respect for human rights, are such that our support to
the countries concerned is a moral duty,” said Françoise Grossête, a
Christian Democrat, during the European Parliament debate.
Mr.
Sorensen, the director general for humanitarian aid in Brussels,
scoffed at demands from some populist politicians that Europe should
seal itself off from infected countries. Noting that tight border
controls had never stopped flu from spreading, he said: “It is better to
deal with this disease at its root and not wait until it comes here
like the plague in the Middle Ages.”
Despite
its cumbersome decision-making apparatus, Mr. Sorensen said, the
European Union moved swiftly back in March, allocating extra financing
to Doctors Without Borders, within days of the virus being identified.
The private aid organization has been a leader in providing an extensive
front-line response.
At
first it looked as if the response was adequate, with reported cases
leveling off and even dropping, raising hopes that, as in 23 previous
Ebola outbreaks recorded in Africa since 1976, the virus had been
contained.
Instead
it spread, in part because some people feared that aid workers might
actually be spreading the disease and stopped seeking treatment. Doctors
Without Borders closed a facility in southern Guinea after an attack in
April by a stone-throwing crowd. Villagers later killed eight African
members of a team trying to raise awareness of Ebola in that region.
The
European Union has since sharply stepped up its financing to Ebola-hit
countries, with a total of $230 million now committed to the region. Of
that, about $127 million will go toward trying to prop up rudimentary
health and other government services in Liberia and Sierra Leone, with
an additional $51 million targeted directly at Ebola efforts. Individual
European countries have pledged upward of $255 million.
Philippe
Maughan, a European Union aid official who was recently in West Africa,
said support to governments was vital because Ebola also kills
indirectly by paralyzing hospitals and making it impossible for Africans
with unrelated ailments to get treatment. “If you drop on the street
from a heart attack, nobody will touch you because they think you have
Ebola,” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment