Last week’s $3.4 billion pledge exceeded expectations and brings the total amount committed to recovery to $5.18 billion - more than double the amount spent on malaria in 2014.
What remains to be seen is how effectively this funding will be put to use. There are concerns about how the disbursement of funds will be measured and tracked.
The ONE Campaign, an advocacy organization working to end preventable disease, recently released its own report calling for greater accountability from donors. ONE’s researchers found that inconsistent reporting by donors and the limitations of resource tracking mechanisms lead to an incomplete understanding of how Ebola donations are utilized. Keeping better track of resources, ONE wrote in the report, can save lives.
“If we don’t know what has really been pledged and delivered, no one can adequately match promised resources to the needs on the ground. That means gaps cannot be easily identified and we risk losing time, resources, and lives,” ONE’s Global Health Policy Director Erin Hohlfelder said in a statement.
There may not be one answer to what should come next in Ebola recovery and preparedness for a future outbreak, but there are leaders in the global health community who see progress.
“I do think we are better prepared,” said Dr. Edward Cox, director of the Office of Antimicrobial Products in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.
Cox and other scientists are already thinking about how to bolster the US capacity to respond to the emerging threat of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which first emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and to date has been recorded in 26 countries with 436 deaths – killing 30 to 40 percent of patients diagnosed with the disease, according to the CDC.
“Now we’re looking at MERS and trying to think about what do we need to be doing at this stage to be well-positioned,” said Cox. “We’re building a lot on what we learned and did for Ebola.”
“I think it’s important at this point that everyone keep a lot of pressure on. Because Ebola was very, very scary, but it could have been a lot worse and the next one could be a lot worse,” said Waldman, the physician for Save.
He thought for a moment, squinting diagonally at the sodium-orange obscurity of the Cairo dusk.
Aly told me he had met up with friends on the evening of January 24. There was a big group of them, a dozen or more, all young professionals, gathered debating, at the Jazz Club. Three bottles of whiskey were on the table, two of them empty. After all, the next day was a holiday.
“I think we should go,” Aly had said, definite, palm on the table. Until the day before he had been hovering fifty-fifty. There would be a heavy police presence. (The holiday was Police Day.) There would be violence and arrests. And the likelihood was that it would be just another pointless demonstration, a few hundred people surrounded by an even greater number of State Security.
The friends talked openly with each other, though they didn’t usually discuss politics. Not so much out of fear, Aly thought, but simply because they were resigned to stasis. For a couple of weeks now Tunisia had buzzed softly through Cairo conversations. Aly had logged in to the “We Are All Khalid Said” Facebook page and seen all the messages of solidarity and exhortation. The cymbals clashed, high-hat swish, a certain discordance between the jazz and the cocktail-party hum of the bar. It seemed odd to Aly that even a week ago the idea of protest had been something abstract, even unthought of, and if thought about at all, easily dismissed with cynicism.
“It won’t make any difference,” one of their number, a banker, said. “It’s just a risk for no purpose.”
“Those of you who have lived outside of Egypt think differently, you think things are possible, but this is just not reality,” said another. Aly made a wry face at this, but perhaps they were right: he had a Canadian passport and a degree from McGill, and had worked in London; he had only returned to Cairo a couple of years before to become a partner in his family’s law firm.
Aly tried to convince the rest of his group. He was a lawyer; he made his case: