The world is losing the battle against Ebola – that's the damning conclusion from the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders.  MSF’s International President Dr. Joanne Liu castigated world leaders for protecting their own borders instead of helping contain Ebola at the source – a response she calls “lethally inadequate”.

Liu told the United Nations that six months in to the outbreak, the response has been worse than “too little, too late”.  And no amount of vaccinations and new drugs would be able to prevent the escalating disaster.

“It is impossible to keep up with the sheer number of infected people pouring into facilities.  In Sierra Leone, infectious bodies are rotting in the streets,” she said.  “Rather than building new Ebola care centers in Liberia, we are forced to build crematoria.”

The UN World Health Organization (WHO) last week admitted that it likely has underestimated the breadth of the outbreak in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, and now Senegal.  Officially, the death toll is just over 1,550 out of more than 3,000 infections, but officials acknowledge it’s probably much worse.

As if to underscore the chaos, video has emerged of a patient who escaped an Ebola treatment center in Liberia, running away through an open-air market in search of food.  People rush out of the way of the infected man in the red shirt, as health workers in the crude isolation suits that are available pursue him.  Eventually, he is forced into the back of a UNICEF truck and taken away.  Witnesses said he was the fifth person to walk away from the treatment center on Tuesday.

With entire national health systems collapsing and health workers fleeing, people in the five Ebola countries are often at a loss to get care for the simplest of maladies. 

Dr. Joanne Liu says it will take massive military intervention from the armies of the world to get control of the situation, so that food, medicine, and health workers are deployed effectively. 

“To curb the epidemic, it is imperative that states immediately deploy civilian and military assets with expertise in biohazard containment.  I call upon you to dispatch your disaster response teams, backed by the full weight of your logistical capabilities.  This should be done in close collaboration with the affected countries.  Without this deployment, we will never get the epidemic under control.”