The World Bank on Thursday announced an additional $100 million in funding to assist the United Nations in deploying international health-workers to fight the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said the funds will go towards deploying foreign health-workers to Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The World Bank's latest funds bring the total amount contributed to the crisis to $500 million. "The world's response to the Ebola crisis has increased significantly in recent weeks, but we still have a huge gap in getting enough trained health workers to the areas with the highest infection rates," Kim said in a statement. More than 5,000 international health-workers are needed in the three hardest-hit countries, and there are at least 13,703 Ebola cases in six affected countries, and 4,922 confirmed deaths, according to the U.N. World Health Organization (WHO). The new funds will help meet the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response's (UNMEER's) goal of isolating and treating 70 percent of the cases in West Africa, and burying 70 percent of the bodies within 60 days. "Even as we focus intensely on the Ebola emergency response, we must also invest in public health infrastructure, institutions, and systems to prepare for the next epidemic, which could spread much more quickly, kill even more people and potentially devastate the global economy," Kim added.
