The World Health Organization has estimated that as of the end of the second week of January 2015 the cases of Ebola reported in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, and Mali are far in excess of 20 000 with an overall fatality rate of about 45%. Although progress has been made in containing transmission, an unacceptably high number of new cases are still reported in several regions of West Africa. In the absence of a vaccine, the control of the epidemic will rely mainly on traditional measures such as early case detection, isolation and treatment of infected individuals. Allocation of proper resources is therefore of paramount importance to deliver appropriate therapy, implement protection and containment measures as well as to protect fragile health-care systems such as those of the affected countries from collapsing under the exceptional effort of controlling the outbreak. Resources and personnel are being diverted from hospitals and health-care centres to Ebola treating facilities, creating dangerous gaps in general health care available to the resident population and threatening the correct implementation of disease control measures against other diseases that are endemic in those regions, including measles and malaria.
In this issue we publish a first attempt to calculate the cost of individual Ebola cases according to different outcomes. This analysis revealed that severe cases of Ebola require recourses that are in order of magnitude higher than those needed to treat other life threatening diseases such as malaria, measles and meningitis. According to the model used here the cost accrued ranges to date from 82 to over 356 million US dollars against 117 million US dollars already disbursed by the World Bank. This information is of paramount importance for mobilizing additional resource to fully control the current epidemics, but also in the future for dealing with individual cases and periodic smaller outbreaks. It must however be emphasized that the present calculation is an underestimate as the model does not include social and economic costs. It must be considered the possibility that the failure to fully control the present outbreak after more than a year is potentially due to a mobilization of resources that has not been adequate.