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Ebola funding falls short

Washington - The Ebola outbreak is the biggest global health challenge since the emergence of Aids, a top US health official said Thursday during an address at the World Bank.

"In the 30 years I've been working in public health, the only thing like this has been Aids," said Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

"We have to work now so that this is not the next Aids," he said in reference to repeated calls by advocacy groups for the international community to speed up efforts to contain the virus in West Africa.

So far, donor countries have funded less than a third of the $988m that the United Nations has appealed for to fight Ebola and stabilise the affected countries.

The presidents of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone appealed for help in the form of health workers and millions of additional dollars, not only to fight the haemorrhagic fever, but also to prevent severe economic fallout in affected countries.

"The countries are in a very fragile situation," Guinean President Alpha Conde said in Washington.

He pointed out that two-thirds of those infected belong to the most economically active age segment of the population, those between 15 and 50.

"Unless we quickly contain and stop the Ebola epidemic, nothing less than the future, not only of West Africa, but perhaps even Africa, is at stake," World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said.

Meanwhile in Europe, the treatment of Ebola patients evacuated from West Africa continued apace.

One man - a UN employee from Liberia - landed in the eastern German town of Leipzig for treatment early Thursday, local officials said.

He is the third person infected with Ebola to be treated in Germany.

He landed shortly after 03:00 GMT in a modified Gulfstream jet equipped with an isolation chamber and was met by a medical team in biohazard suits and two ambulances.

In Spain, meanwhile, the health of a nurse suffering from Ebola - the first infection to have taken place on European soil - is in decline, her brother said. His comments were confirmed by the hospital.

The Madrid clinic where she works - which was forced to admit that improper handling of an Ebola case may have caused the infection -quarantined an additional four people, among them three doctors and one nurse.

The latest infections have raised fears of the virus spreading within European borders. A spokesperson for EU Health Commissioner Tonio Borg said that the introduction of new screenings at European airports was being discussed in Brussels.

"This is a competence of the member states, in the sense that each member state could decide to impose new screenings and checking at the airport. Nevertheless, we are now discussing [it] at EU level - it's under consideration," he said.

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