KUALA LUMPUR (Sept 18): A World Bank team has found that if the Ebola virus is not contained, the economic cost to the African nations where there virus has spread would grow by eight-fold by 2015.

In a statement on its website Sept 17, the World Bank group president Dr Kim Yong Jim said this would deal deal a potentially catastrophic blow to their already fragile economies.

He said the World Bank Group had just completed an analysis of the economic impact of the spread of Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

Kim said the bank’s top priority was to do all it could to save lives and prevent new infections.

“In fact, our first US$117 million in total, in mostly grant funding, is focused purely on the immediate humanitarian response,” he said.

Kim said the bank’s economists had also been doing the work of understanding the economic impact of Ebola.

“They looked at many factors including the SARS epidemic from 2002 to 2004.  That outbreak caused 800 deaths and cost more than $40 billion in economic losses.

“We learned from studies that during SARS and the H1N1 outbreak in 2009 that fear and aversion behavior caused as much as 80 to 90 percent of these epidemics' total economic impact,” he said.

Kim said the fear of contagion had helped fuel an economic crisis in the Ebola crisis as well.

“There are two kinds of contagion.  One is related to the virus itself, and the second is related to the spread of fear about the virus,” he said.

Kim said that already, the fear factor from the Ebola outbreak had reduced labor force participation, closed places of employment, disrupted transportation, and motivated some government and private decision makers to close seaports and airports.

Kim said that for 2014, the World Bank estimates that the GDP losses to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea from the crisis would be a combined $360 million.

He said the findings on the Ebola outbreak focus solely on the three most affected countries, but according to the bank’s preliminary estimates, the virus' spread to other African nations could cost billions of dollars and depending on the scenario, “potentially many billions of dollars”.