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The Economic Community of West Africa (ECOWAS) created a ‘solidarity fund’ to contain and manage the outbreak, [17] and the World Health Organisation convened an emergency meeting of regional health ministers in Accra to strengthen surveillance operations and facilitate cross-border consultations. [18] The World Health Organisation also opened a Sub-Regional Outbreak Coordinating Center in Conakry. [19] Doctors Without Borders has deployed 300 personnel to assist in health care facilities, and both the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the European Union have provided scientific personnel and resources to assist with laboratory testing and government coordination. [20]

The World Health Organisation fulfilled its coordinating mission by organising a meeting of regional health officials in Accra in early July—but that was three-and-a-half months after the first report of the disease. WHO’s Sub-Regional Outbreak Coordination Center has the potential to be a useful resource, but it took nearly four months from the outbreak’s beginning until WHO began such operations. Given how quickly Ebola spreads and its virulence, such a delay helped the disease gain a foothold in the region. Arresting the spread of infectious diseases requires quicker action.

First, the current response needs to be ratcheted up. Opening sub-regional command centers, deploying personnel from governmental and nongovernmental sources, and providing financial resources are all important—but they need to be done in greater number and with greater urgency. The initial efforts are not necessarily failures; they are just too small and slow in response to the overwhelming nature of this unprecedented outbreak.

The spread of Ebola virus occurs because health infrastructure in the region is fragmented, under-resourced, or non-existent. And the therapeutic response to the illness is constrained by failure of markets to drive drug and vaccine development that would help the world’s

But drugs and a vaccine are being sent to the region, after a ruling from an ethics panel convened by the World Health Organization decided their use was acceptable even though they haven’t been definitively shown to be safe or effective.

Think about it this way: if Ebola virus outbreaks had occurred in New York, London, or Sydney, effective therapies surely would have been developed long ago.

The specter of an uprising of reanimated corpses also poses a significant challenge to interpreters of international relations and the theories they use to understand the world. If the dead begin to rise from the grave and attack the living, what thinking would -- or should -- guide the human response?

For our purposes, a zombie is defined as a reanimated being occupying a human corpse, with a strong desire to eat human flesh

Because they can spread across borders and threaten states and civilizations, these zombies should command the attention of scholars and policymakers.

The first component, support to the EVD outbreak response plans and strengthening essential health services will contribute to finance critical gaps in ongoing emergency response efforts funded by governments and development partners in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

he second component, human resources scale up for outbreak response and essential health services will supplement the efforts of governments and other partners to motivate and reward health workers in the affected countries to work on the EVD emergency response and provide other essential health services.

The third component, provision of food and basic supplies to quarantined populations and EVD affected household's aims to improve access to food and other basic supplies for the EVD affected households in the quarantined areas and other hot zones in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. 

The effort has been messy, inefficient and expensive, often lagging the epidemic’s twists in tragic ways.

Despite difficulty filling positions, the W.H.O. now reports that it has more than 700 people working at 77 field sites, the largest emergency response in its history.

Charities with no background treating Ebola patients began running hospitals specialized for Ebola care, some of which were built by militaries and others staffed by hundreds of personnel from China and Cuba who were also facing Ebola for the first time and trying to overcome language challenges.

The key goals of the pandemics team at the SGTF are detecting an outbreak faster, verifying that it's a real sign and getting a connected network of people to talk about what's going on.

The United States is planning to build as many as 17 Ebola treatment centers in Liberia, with about 1,700 treatment beds, while the United Nations is planning an expanded mission in the region, based in Accra, Ghana, according to Anthony Banbury, the United Nation’s Ebola operation crisis manager. It is intended to be more nimble than the United Nations’ notoriously bureaucratic operations, bringing in as many as 500 trucks and jeeps from other missions in Africa, possibly paying teams in one country to speed up safe burials, buying fuel for monitoring teams in another country, or offering helicopters to transport health workers where they are needed.

Whether Sierra Leone’s lockdown will constitute an effective response is open to question. Despite the mobilization, the volunteers hardly appeared to be thick on the ground. In some neighborhoods, residents said they were yet to see any of the green-vested young men and women who had volunteered.