Ebola crisis: UN envoy rejects criticism of agency's response.

UN Ebola co-ordinator David Nabarro: "We are putting in place the foundations of a very powerful response"

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The UN's special envoy for Ebola has defended efforts to fight the virus in West Africa after leading aid agency MSF said they had had no real impact.

David Nabarro told the BBC that plans were on course to provide 4,000 beds for Ebola patients by next month, compared with 300 at the end of August.
MSF coordinator Christopher Stokes says the virus is still out of control.
A damning internal report from the UN's own health agency, the World Health Organization (WHO), has also emerged.
The WHO report found that it had failed to respond in time to a "perfect storm", according to the document reported by the Associated Press news agency.
Sources close to the WHO also told Bloomberg news agency of multiple failures in the outbreak's early stages.
In the worst affected countries - Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone - the Ebola virus has now killed 4,546 people with cases of infection numbering 9,191, according to the latest WHO figures.

 

The World Health Organization is ramping up efforts to stop Ebola from spreading elsewhere in Africa

'Very powerful response' The BBC's international development correspondent, Mark Doyle, asked Mr Nabarro to respond to the MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres) allegation that all of the recent international pledges of help and deployments of staff had not yet had any impact on the epidemic.
Mr Nabarro said he had seen a big increase in the international response over the past two months:
"I am absolutely certain that when we look at the history, that this effort that has been put in place will have been shown to have had an impact, though I will accept that we probably won't see a reduction in the outbreak curve until the end of the year.
"We are putting in place the foundations of a very powerful response."

Christopher Stokes of MSF: "[The crisis] has never been under control"

Earlier, MSF's Christopher Stokes told our correspondent that it was "ridiculous" that his volunteers were still bearing the brunt of the care.
MSF, he said, was still running the majority of Ebola treatment facilities across the region, responsible for 700 of the 1,000 or so beds in place.
Recent high-profile offers of help from the international community such as a British Army field hospital being built in Sierra Leone would not have any significant impact for a month or six weeks, Mr Stokes said.

"I've lost five members of my family"

The internal WHO report seen by AP states: "Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall. A perfect storm was brewing, ready to burst open in full force."
It says that experts should have realised that traditional methods of containing infectious disease would not work in a region with porous borders and poor health systems.
Issues highlighted by the unnamed WHO sources who spoke to Bloomberg include

• Delays in WHO experts in the field sending reports to headquarters in Geneva
• Bureaucratic hurdles preventing $500,000 (£311,000) reaching the response effort in Guinea
• Virus contact tracers (tasked with identifying people who may have come into contact with sufferers) refusing to work out of concern they would not get paid