Global Health – PBS NewsHour

How effective will new U.S. aid and military support be in fighting Ebola? Laurie Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations and Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown Law School join Judy Woodruff for a deep dive into the plan. Then special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro offers an update from Nigeria, a country that has been relatively successful in controlling the deadly virus.

The United States will offer 3,000 troops and financial help to health care systems in West Africa that are overwhelmed by Ebola. President Obama announced that U.S. forces will build new treatment facilities, airlift hundreds of thousands of home health kits and train and treat health care workers. Meanwhile, the WHO predicts that infections will double every three weeks. Judy Woodruff reports.

The number of deaths from the worst Ebola outbreak on record has now surpassed 2,300. To combat the epidemic, the U.S. has pledged funds, research and additional medical resources. Judy Woodruff sits down with Nancy Lindborg of the U.S. Agency for International Development for a detailed look at what the U.S. is providing.

After reaching their fifties and raising their own children, Jenny and Richard Bowen adopted 2-year-old Maya from China after learning of poor orphanage conditions for abandoned girls. Sixteen years later, the Bowens have two adopted daughters from the same region and have started a non-profit called Half the Sky to transform orphan care with the cooperation of the Chinese government. Fred de Sam Lazaro reports.

The international head of Doctors Without Borders has charged that many of the efforts to curtail the Ebola outbreak in West Africa have actually made it worse. Jeffrey Brown joins director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Tom Frieden, who just returned from surveying the situation in West Africa, to discuss the impediments to containing the disease, and the prospects of it spreading.

An Ebola vaccine may be ready for human testing as early as next week. Though the vaccine is in its first stage of testing with humans, it showed favorable results in an infected monkey. Gwen Ifill learns more from Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

There have been 3,000 cases of Ebola virus confirmed in the current outbreak, but the World Health Organization forecasts that the total number could top 20,000 and spread to 10 additional countries. In response, the agency is rolling out a $490 million plan over the next nine months to stem the outbreak. Gwen Ifill reports.

There are now more than 2,600 confirmed or suspected cases of Ebola, and more than 1,400 deaths resulting from the virus. All of the cases have originated in West Africa. For the latest on the global health crisis, Drew Hinshaw of the Wall Street Journal joins Hari Sreenivasan via Skype from Ghana.

Signaling a new public health emergency, the World Health Organization warns that if polio is not completely eradicated it could become endemic again. Worldwide, 74 cases of the crippling disease have been confirmed this year, with Syria, Cameroon and Pakistan leading with the most occurrences. Jeffrey Brown learns more from Dr. Jon Andrus from the Pan American Health Organization.

In our news wrap Monday, the World Health Organization has declared a global health emergency amid outbreaks of polio across Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The U.N. agency says the number of new cases last year nearly doubled to 417. Also, some landslide survivors say they haven’t received assistance after the disaster in northeastern Afghanistan killed as many as 2,700 people.