His statement might alarm many people. But Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg told DW that he is losing hope, that Sierra Leone and Liberia will receive the necessary aid in time. Those are two of the countries worst hit by the recent Ebola epidemic. Schmidt-Chanasit expects the virus will "become endemic" in this part of the world, if no massive assistance arrives. With other words: It could more or less infect everybody and many people could die.Schmidt-Chanasit knows that it is a hard thing to say. He stresses that he doesn't want international help to stop. Quite the contrary: he demands "massive help". For Sierra Leone and Liberia, though, he thinks "it is very difficult to bring enough help there to get a grip on the epidemic." According to the virologist, the most important thing to do now is to prevent the virus from spreading to other countries. Moreover, much more money has to be put into evaluating suitable vaccines, he added.
In the headquarters of Welthungerhilfe, a German non-governmental aid organization that is engaged in helping with the Ebola epidemic, Schmidt-Chanasit's statement causes much contempt. Such declarations "are not very constructive," a spokeswoman said.