New Insurance To Help Poor Countries Tackle Pandemics Like Ebola, Zika

A new tool aims to help poor countries manage epidemics, before they devastate their health and finances. The World Bank recently launched the “Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility” an insurance market designed to quickly disburse funds to countries and agencies tackling infectious disease outbreaks. “Pandemics pose some of the biggest threats in the world to people’s lives and to economies,” Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank Group, said in a statement. “For the first time we will have a system that can move funding and teams of experts to the sites of outbreaks before they spin out of control.” Over the last two years, the Ebola epidemic caused more than 11,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. It also severely weakened economies in West Africa, costing Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone a collective $2.8 billion in GDP losses, according to the World Bank. If the new financing had existed in mid-2014, when Ebola first began spreading, the global cost of responding to the outbreak could have been cut from a whopping $7 billion to $300 million -- or 4 percent of what was spent -- Keith Hansen, World Bank vice-president, told the Financial Times. More crucially, the outbreak might also have been more easily contained, saving countless lives.  “This [new financing] facility addresses a long, collective failure in dealing with pandemics,” Kim said. “The Ebola crisis taught us th...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news