UN chief say 20 times more money needed to fight outbreak described as biggest global health threat since Aids

The International Monetary Fund has changed its rules to allow the west African countries hit by the Ebola epidemic to borrow more and run up bigger deficits, as the head of the UN said 20 times more money was needed to fight the outbreak described as the biggest global health threat since Aids.

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, said it was dropping its normal opposition to extra borrowing for the three worst-hit countries, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. Lagarde said it was good to increase budget deficits at the current time, adding: “We don’t say that very often.”

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, said the response to the outbreak that has left almost 4,000 dead had so far been inadequate. “For those who have yet to pledge, I say please do so soon,” he said. “This is an unforgiving disease.”

The appeal came as the presidents of the three countries said they could not cope with the crisis and pleaded with the international community to send more help.

The world’s response had not kept pace with the spread of Ebola, said Sierra Leone’s president, Ernst Bai Koroma, speaking by video to a summit held at the annual meeting of the IMF and the World Bank, and describing the disease as “a tragedy unforeseen in modern times”.

Tom Frieden, director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told the meeting that Ebola was comparable to Aids. “I have been in public health service for 30 years and the only thing I have seen like this is Aids. We will have to work hard to stop it being the next Aids.”

Frieden’s comments came as new suspected cases of Ebola emerged in Australia and Spain and as the chancellor, George Osborne, said Britain would test people coming into the country if advised to do so by medical experts.

Alpha Condé, president of Guinea, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia, – also spoke at the World Bank-organised summit, which pledged money, health professionals and hospital beds to help deal with the crisis.

The US sent two military planes to Liberia, which has cancelled elections in the latest attempt to stop the spread of the virus.

Critics say Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s handling of the crisis has been heavy-handed and ineffective. Police used batons and rattan whips to disperse 100 protesters outside the national assembly, where legislators were debating granting her even more powers beyond those contained in a state of emergency declared in August.

Condé said: “This is an international threat and it deserves an international response. All of the West African region is threatened.”

After Britain announced on Wednesday that it was scaling up its efforts to curb Ebola, the international development secretary, Justine Greening, called for other countries to do likewise.

“If we wait a month the task will be twice as large. It will kill twice as many people and have twice the impact on economies,” she said.

Jim Kim, the World Bank president, said: “We are still way, way behind the curve and we have to scale up the global response; there is a critical need for more trained health workers.”

Kim also said that more hospitals and local health centres must be built quickly to ensure that west Africans had faith that they could get the care they needed in their own community, and no longer fear Ebola centres as places that people went only to die.

Kim, a doctor who formerly led the World Health Organisation’s global Aids treatment programme, said studies of past disease outbreaks, such as the Sars virus, showed that 80-90% of the economic impact came from “the fear factor that surrounds the outbreak”.

A World Bank study published on Wednesday said the cost of Ebola could be as high as $33bn (£20bn) for west Africa if it could not be contained. The bank has yet to do a broader assessment of its impact on the rest of the world.

Kim said the most urgent humanitarian need was getting medical care to treat people in their own communities. That was also the best way to stop the spread of Ebola to other nations and counter the fear that magnified its economic damage.

“Trying to block your borders or isolate those countries in some way is not going to work,” he said.