Head of World Bank Makes Ebola His Mission

NEW YORK TIMES                                                                                        OCT. 14, 2014

By SABRINA TAVERNISE                        

During a tense discussion, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank president, spoke sharply to Dr. Margaret Chan, the head of the World Health Organization, the agency in charge. You have the authority to act in this emergency, he told her, according to people familiar with the meeting, “so why aren’t you doing it?”

Dr. Chan, for her part, said of the meeting with Dr. Kim: “I share all the frustration. I am also frustrated.” ...

Dr. Jim Yong Kim has found his moment with Ebola, which offers a large-scale test of ideas about health care that he has been working on for decades. Credit Saeed Khan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Dr. Kim, who came to the World Bank in 2012 after three years as president of Dartmouth College, has driven the normally lumbering bank to act on Ebola with uncharacteristic speed. It has committed $400 million to fighting the disease, one of the largest sums of any donor. The first $105 million took just nine days to reach the governments of the affected countries, a pace unheard-of at the bank. Speed is critical, health experts say, as the number of cases is doubling in size every month.

“It has been a massive unleashing of money,” said David Nabarro, the United Nations Secretary General’s special envoy on Ebola. “It has had an immediate and dramatic effect on the situations in the countries.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/science/a-bank-chief-makes-ebola-his-mission.html?ref=science&_r=0