any people have asked me why the outbreak of Ebola virus disease in West Africa is so large, so severe, and so difficult to contain. These questions can be answered with a single word: poverty. The hardest-hit countries, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, are among the poorest in the world. They have only recently emerged from years of conflict and civil war that have left their health systems largely destroyed or severely disabled and, in some areas, left a generation of children without education. In these countries, only one or two doctors are available for every 100,000 people, and these doctors are heavily concentrated in urban areas. Isolation wards and even hospital capacity for infection control are virtually
Margaret Chan, Director-General of the WHO, and the heads of seven other global health agencies, call for a concerted global effort to collect better health data.
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