Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now an update on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
As of yesterday, the World Health Organization reported nearly 18,500 confirmed cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, with more than 6,800 deaths. And while a newly published study finds that the number of unreported, and therefore undercounted, cases may not be as high as once feared, health officials say that, to halt the outbreak, every infection must be traced to its source.
Here to talk about that and more is the president of the World Bank Group, Dr. Jim Yong Kim. He is a medical doctor, and he has just returned from West Africa.
Dr. Kim, thank you for being here.
DR. JIM YONG KIM, President, World Bank Group: Thank you, Judy. Thanks for having me.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So you wrote while you were there that this is the worst epidemic you have ever seen. Of course, I guess, to many, that wouldn’t be surprising, considering the numbers, but what did you see in West Africa?
DR. JIM YONG KIM: Well, when I say it’s the worst, I spent a lot of my life fighting AIDS in Africa. And that was pretty bad, and drug-resistant tuberculosis.
The reason this is so bad is because it is so deadly, and we have to get to zero. There’s no getting almost to zero. Each one of the epidemics in the three countries started with a single case. And what we now know is — especially in this epidemic, is that if you leave a single case untreated and then if you let that transmission continue, it could explode again.
I’m very, very worried about this, because we still don’t have in place plans to get to zero in each of the three countries.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So what is it going to take? You wrote — in the column that you wrote the other day, you said it’s not just money, it’s more local control over what’s happening there.
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