By KRISTA LARSON and MARIA CHENG, Associated Press
MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) — Fourteen-year-old D.J. Mulbah set off at dawn with his mother and grandmother in desperate pursuit of a coveted bed at the Ebola clinic run by Doctors Without Borders in Liberia's capital.
Too weak to stand, they bundled him up into a taxi with his backpack and a yellow plastic bucket for his vomit. Now he lay on the dirt beside the worried women awaiting word on how many new patients would enter the clinic today.
"He's been sick for a week with a runny stomach," says his distressed mother, wiping the sweat off the boy's brow with her bare hands. "We tried calling an ambulance days ago but nobody ever came."
By 8 a.m. there are a dozen suspected Ebola patients crouching and sitting on the ground outside the metal padlocked gates of the facility that can only hold 160 patients. Soon a triage nurse approaches, her voice muffled through a surgical mask covered by a plastic face shield. The news is good, and D.J. manages a faint smile: The clinic will take the boy.
His fortune though comes only from the sorrow of others: Of the 30 new beds available Saturday morning, only seven were made empty by survivors. And the limitations are stark: A sign in a staff tent inside the outdoor hospital warns: "NO IV lines to be inserted until we have enough staff."
Six months after West Africa's first Ebola outbreak emerged, generous offers of aid are finally pouring in, but beds for the sick are filling up as fast as clinics can be built. The hundreds of millions of dollars will also be arriving too late for thousands here as the world's worst-ever outbreak now has killed more than half its victims.
And even as countries try to marshal more resources to close the gap, those needs threaten to become much greater, and possibly even insurmountable. Ambulance sirens blare through standstill traffic here in Monrovia, though often there is nowhere to take the sick except to so-called "holding centers" where they await a bed at an Ebola treatment facility.
Dr. Joanne Liu, international president of Doctors Without Borders, urged world leaders this week to take "immediate action."
"The promised surge has not yet delivered," she said.
Statistics reviewed by The Associated Press and interviews with experts and those on the scene of one of the worst health disasters in modern history show how great the needs are and how little the world has done in response.
— The existing bed capacity for Ebola patients in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea and Nigeria is about 820, well short of the 2,900 beds that are currently needed, according to the World Health Organization. Recently 737 beds were pledged by countries. Yet even after the promised treatment facilities are built, they will still be at least 2,100 beds short.
And if more people get sick than those who recover or die, the shortage will grow even more pronounced. MSF and other aid workers are distributing home care kits with gloves and surgical gowns to try and keep those awaiting hospital beds from infecting relatives while at home, though the distribution of thousands is still far short in Monrovia, a city of 1.6 million.
— The shortage of health workers is also great. WHO has estimated that 1,000 to 2,000 international health workers are needed in West Africa and says it is having trouble recruiting enough help. More than 200 health workers have died as they tried to save lives, complicating recruiting efforts.
Doctors Without Borders, which has more Ebola clinics than anyone, currently has 248 foreign aid workers in the region. The U.S. has pledged to train some 500 local health workers a week, but officials acknowledge that goal is unrealistic in the current environment.
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