RANDAL J. SCHOEPPTechnicians perform tests to confirm cases of Ebola at a laboratory in Liberia RANDAL J. SCHOEPP
The African Union, which has 54 member countries on that continent, will act no later than July 2015 to establish an agency to combat the Ebola virus. Headquartered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (ACDC) will put in place a network of laboratories scattered among several countries, modeled on the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), situated in Stockholm. The ACDC will have a budget of $6.9 million through December 2016 and have a staff of 11. According to experts interviewed by the journal Nature, the initial conditions of the project fall well short of what would be needed to initiate operations at a health agency intended to serve the entire continent. “The budget and staffing are out of proportion to the objectives of the agency,” says Lawrence Gostin, a professor of Public Health at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. In an April 2015 editorial, Nature called the project opportune, but inadequate in terms of format: “Africa has an ambitious and welcome plan for a continent-wide center for disease control — but if the agency is to live up to its promise, it will need substantially better resources.” The editorial cites the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which was created in 1946 with an annual budget of today’s equivalent of $120 million, now has a staff of 15,000, and spends $7 billion annually. More than 10,000 people died during the Ebola epidemic that struck West Africa beginning in March 2014.
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