The plan, which sets a goal of reversing the trend in new Ebola cases within two months and stopping all transmission in six to nine months, will require funding from governments, development banks, the private sector and in-kind contributions, according to the document, which was obtained by Bloomberg News. The WHO plans to publish the plan by the end of this week at the earliest and details may change, said Fadela Chaib, a spokeswoman for the Geneva-based agency.

The outbreak has killed 1,427 people in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, and is on the verge of exceeding the total number of deaths from all previous Ebola outbreaks combined. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon this month appointed health crisis expert David Nabarro to coordinate the UN response to Ebola. The WHO has been criticized by the European Commission and aid groups including Doctors Without Borders for a lack of leadership.

“The response at the beginning wasn’t robust enough,” David Heymann, a professor of infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who worked on the first recorded Ebola outbreak in 1976. “It’s a step forward that they’ve made the plans and I’m glad they’re emphasizing rapid containment as a start.”

Treatment Centers

The sum being sought to pay for the work is six times more than the WHO’s appeal for $71 million in a plan published less than a month ago.

More than half the cost will be needed for the treatment, isolation and referral centers that are bearing the brunt of the epidemic, according to the WHO plan. Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone are among the world’s poorest countries, and weak health systems combined with a lack of experienced health-care workers has contributed to the epidemic, the WHO has said.

The WHO this month declared Ebola in West Africa a public health emergency of international concern. A separate outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed as many as 13 people, the government in that country said yesterday.

In West Africa, more than 240 health care workers have been infected and 120 have died, the agency said in a statement today. Among them is Abraham Borbor, the deputy chief medical officer of Liberia’s John F. Kennedy Medical Center, who died despite being treated with Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc.’s experimental ZMapp medicine, the nation’s information minister said today.

British Worker

Borbor was one of three Liberian health-care workers being treated with ZMapp, the same drug that was used on two American aid workers who were evacuated to the U.S. after being infected in Liberia. Closely held Mapp, based in San Diego, has said its supply of the drug is exhausted.

A British health worker, William Pooley, was flown home for treatment at London’s Royal Free hospital after being infected in Sierra Leone, Public Health England said in a statement yesterday.

Pooley is receiving “excellent care,” his family said in a statement on the hospital’s website, as it asked “everyone to remember those in other parts of the world suffering with Ebola who do not have access to the same health-care facilities as Will.”

‘Alarming Ways’

A Senegalese disease-tracker working with the WHO in Sierra Leone also became infected, making him the first of the agency’s 400 workers in the affected countries to fall ill with the deadly virus, the WHO said today.

The epidemic “continues to evolve in alarming ways, with the severely affected countries, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, struggling to control the escalating outbreak against a backdrop of severely compromised health systems, significant deficits in capacity and rampant fear,” according to the draft of the WHO’s so-called road map. “Clearly a massively scaled and coordinated international response is needed to support affected and at-risk countries.”

The document has been shared with the WHO’s partners for comment and will be published once their feedback has been received, Chaib said. The final document will include a country- by-country plan for dealing with the outbreak, she said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Simeon Bennett in Geneva at [email protected] To contact the editors responsible for this story: Phil Serafino at [email protected] Tom Lavell