The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $50 million on Wednesday to support emergency efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The U.S.-based agency is allocating money to United Nations agencies and international organizations to buy supplies and scale up the emergency response in the affected countries. They are also giving funds to public and private sector partners to speed up the development of drugs, vaccines and diagnostics that could help fight the virus and its spread.
The latest data from the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that about 4,300 people have been infected and more than half of those people have died since March, when the outbreak began. The virus is currently raging in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, and it is spreading to neighboring countries Senegal and Nigeria.
On Tuesday, the WHO said the virus killed nearly 200 people in a single day, bringing the death toll to 2,296. The organization warns that the virus is growing exponentially and might reach up to 20,000 infections in West Africa before it is stopped.
“We are working urgently with our partners to identify the most effective ways to help them save lives now and stop transmission of this deadly disease,” Sue Desmond-Hellmann, the Gates Foundation’s chief executive officer, said in a statement.
The Gates Foundation has already committed $10 million to fight the Ebola outbreak, including $5 million to the WHO for emergency operations and research and development assessment,s and $5 million to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF to support efforts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.
With this new pledge, they want to be sure that some of the money goes toward long-term solutions. “The spread of this disease has really happened because of the very weak health systems in these very poor countries,” said Chris Elias, the Gates Foundation’s head of global development. “We need to be thinking how we can build up those health services, how we train healthcare workers, and how we make sure they have the equipment they need to do their jobs.”