Sept. 15 (GIN)—Between $100 million and $180 million have been committed to the fight against Ebola in West Africa, an amount considered much too little and reaching the needy much too slowly.

A 25-bed unit pledged by the Pentagon for Liberia, noted the international president of Medecins sans Frontieres, also known as Doctors Without Borders, would treat only health care workers, not the broader population. Furthermore, it may not be delivered for another month. The slow U.S. response to the crisis has been sharply criticized by infectious disease experts.

“New isolation and treatment facilities must be built quickly and on a large scale,” insisted MSF chief Joanne Liu. “In days, not weeks or months.”

Other shortcomings of the U.S. response include the limited number of hygiene kits, containing disinfectants, gloves and other materials, that can prevent spread of the disease among family members. The U.S. will deliver only 50,000 kits in about a month, whereas 400,000 people live in highly infected areas of Liberia, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“The U.S. can do better than this,” wrote The New York Times in their Saturday editorial. “Even with its increased responsibilities in the Middle East, the Pentagon surely has enough logistical and technical resources to greatly augment aid to the Ebola-stricken countries.”

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, in an urgent note to President Barack Obama, wrote, “I am being honest with you when I say that at this rate, we will never break the transmission chain and the virus will overwhelm us.”

Meanwhile, a pledge to send 165 doctors and nurses to Sierra Leone from Cuba was announced this weekend. It would be the biggest commitment of personnel to the health crisis so far by any country, said Margaret Chan of the World Health Organization. The new team, now receiving specialist training in Cuba, will deploy in the first week of October and will stay six months.

A Liberian epidemiologist and immunologist, whose efforts were highlighted in a recent news feature, appears to be having success with a strategy that uses “zones,” much as was done during Liberia’s civil war to ensure that everybody received food and other vital supplies.

“Dr. Mosoka Fallah has taken the situation in West Point as if he were living here,” said an organizer in the West Point neighborhood. “We can say openly: Had he not been here, things would have gotten far worse.”

In a related development, the U.S. government provided $24.9 million to replenish the exhausted supply of ZMapp, an experimental drug.