But big hitters such as China or Brazil, or former colonial powers such France and the UK, have not been stepping up to the plate. Instead, the single biggest medical force on the Ebola frontline has been a small island: Cuba.
That a nation of 11 million people, with a GDP of $6,051 per capita, is leading the effort says much of the international response. A brigade of 165 Cuban health workers arrived in Sierra Leone last week, the first batch of a total of 461. In sharp contrast, western governments have appeared more focused on stopping the epidemic at their borders than actually stemming it in west Africa. The international effort now struggling to keep ahead of the burgeoning cases might have nipped the outbreak in the bud had it come earlier.
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The WHO estimates Sierra Leone alone needs around 10,000 health workers. Médecins sans Frontières, the international medical aid charity which has led efforts from the beginning, has about 250 staff on the ground in the affected countries. The second-largest government brigade is from the African Union, which is dispatching about 100 health workers.
It’s not the first time Cuba has played an outsized role in a major disaster. Its government may be beset by allegations of human rights abuse, but its contribution to relief brigades is unrivalled: currently, some 50,000 Cuban-trained health workers are spread over 66 countries. Cuba provided the largest medical contingent after the Haiti earthquake disaster in 2010, providing care to almost 40% of the victims. And while some 400 US doctors volunteered in the aftermath of that quake, fewer than 10 had registered for the IMC’s Ebola effort, the organisation said.
Cuba leads fight against Ebola in Africa as west frets about border security
This is the first time Cuban doctors have mobilized to fight Ebola, and Cuban state media reports that some 15,000 health professionals have expressed an interest in traveling to West African nations to help.
Under Castro, Cuba nationalized its healthcare system and inserted a constitutional guarantee of free healthcare for all. As a result, health indicators on the island have greatly improved, reports The Washington Post.
Havana regularly sends medical aid and teams of healthcare workers to nations suffering natural disasters. The Post writes that health workers are “up there with rum and cigars in terms of Cuban exports.”
Soon after its revolution, Cuba sent doctors to Chile to help the nation recover from a deadly 1960 earthquake.
Cuba sent 2,500 health workers to Pakistan after an earthquake in 2005.
1,500 Cuban health professionals traveled to Haiti after its 2010 earthquake.
Some 30,000 Cubans currently work in Venezuela’s health system; Cuba is partially paid in oil for its contribution.
An estimated 4,500 Cuban doctors are currently supplementing Brazil’s public health system in rural parts of the country or undesirable city neighborhoods.
“We work on malaria, cholera, dengue, a disaster situation, floods in Venezuela, floods in Guatemala, floods in Belize,” Jorge Delgado Bustillo, head of the Cuban Medical Brigade to Sierra Leone, told The Wall Street Journal.
Cuba to the Rescue Ebola-stricken countries Welcome Castro's Doctors
While I have come to believe that travel restrictions are prudent and practicable, I also believe it need not have come to this if we had acted sooner. Blessings upon the dead and those who are so heroically fighting to save them.