Health officials from the three most-ravaged countries namely Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, as well as representatives from financial groups, international agencies and even private aid organizations are attending a meeting and forum that will deal on building and establishing resilient health systems to avoid another outbreak of a disease.
The latest data and report from the World Health Organization confirmed that there are now 17,942 confirmed Ebola cases from the three countries. The death toll now has reached 6,388 mostly from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
In Geneva, health ministers conducted a meeting and they said that the main reason why the Ebola outbreak went out of hand is that, these countries have a weak health system. They agreed that focusing on fighting the disease has led to the neglect of critical and essential routine health needs.
Dr. Bernice Dahn, Liberia's Chief Medical Officer said that it created a health crisis as pregnant women do not have access to health care and even children are not being immunized. Other people with health conditions are not catered to by any health system. Moreover, even the death of many health workers from the deadly disease led to the closure of many health facilities. The main reason why the outbreak went out of control is that, when it started in the far flung communities in West Africa, there was no healthy system or health workers to properly diagnose the disease and give immediate treatment.
"If you look at the general deaths, it is over 6,000 -- and that is by far higher than the number of persons who have died from Ebola in my country. We believe we could have saved some of those deaths if our hospitals are open and functioning while we focus on getting rid of Ebola. And, so for my country, we decided to take a two-pronged approach -- continue to fight Ebola to get it to zero and revive routine health care services," said Dahn.
In fact, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone are among the poorest countries in the world. All of them have malfunctioning health care systems even before the Ebola outbreak. The countries and their government are unprepared to face the normal demands of the populations.
WHO said that these countries only had one or two physicians for a population of 100,000 and it worsened because more than 600 health care workers have been infected with the deadly disease.