Ebola response will be subject of Senate hearing Tuesday

The international challenges presented by the African Ebola epidemic will be the subject of a Senate hearing Tuesday examining what role the U.S. should play.

Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is one of the scheduled speakers who will provide testimony before the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions to discuss the ongoing health crisis that has killed more than 2,200 people as of Sept. 7, according to figures from the World Health Organization released Friday.

There have been more than 4,300 suspected and confirmed cases of the disease since the outbreak began last December. It has spread throughout Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, with new cases reported in Nigeria and Senegal.

Despite a recent request from the Obama administration for $88 million in funding to aid emergency efforts that was included in a short-term House spending bill last week, many have criticized the global response to the epidemic as too slow and insufficient to address the pace at which the virus is spreading throughout the region. Nearly half of all reported cases have occurred over the past month, according to the WHO.

Last month Dr. Joanne Liu, president of the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders, said the international community needed to increase its efforts to contain the outbreak.

“The World Health Organization, the international community in general, and nongovernmental organizations must rapidly scale up their response and send in more teams,” Liu said. “It is urgent that management and coordination are improved, but also that strategies are implemented to reach all affected areas and to help improve general access to healthcare in areas where the system has collapsed.”

In response to the overwhelming need for additional healthcare personnel, Cuba announced on Friday that it plans to send 165 health professionals—the largest contingent from any foreign country thus far—to Sierra Leone beginning in October for a six-month stay to help in relief efforts.

For its part, the CDC has said that as of Sept. 2, about 70 agency personnel have been deployed to affected countries to aid in surveillance, tracking contacts, database management and educating residents as well as local health workers.

On returning from a visit to the affected areas of Africa last month, Frieden said there was an immediate need for countries to increase their response to the outbreak, warning that time was quickly running out to prevent its spread throughout the entire African continent.

“The window of opportunity to stop Ebola from spreading widely throughout Africa and becoming a global threat for years to come is closing, but it is not yet closed,” Frieden said in a written statement Sept. 2. “If the world takes the immediate steps—which are direct requests from the front lines of the outbreak and the presidents of each country—we can still turn this around.”

Follow Steven Ross Johnson on Twitter: @MHsjohnson