obama hosting

U.S. President Barack Obama is this week hosting fifty African leaders in Washington D.C. It's an event the White House has dubbed "historic," and it's designed to promote trade and investment. But as the summit launched Monday, the deadliest Ebola outbreak in history was intensifying in Western Africa. Two VIPs -- Nobel Peace prize recipient and president of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and her Serra Leone counterpart Ernest Bai Koroma -- canceled their trips. Instead, they chose to stay in their home countries and deal with a health crisis that has so far claimed nearly 900 lives. It has also dragged on the region's economies, and the economic pain is expected to get worse. At the summit's opening day, the World Bank pledged $200 million to contain the epidemic. The World Health Organization and West African nations hit by the outbreak have also poured $100 million into plans to try and contain it. But the Ebola virus has hit some of West Africa's most vulnerable economies, and poorest rural areas. The economic growth of Guinea, where more than 300 people have died after being infected by the virus, is now expected by the World Bank and IMF to slow to 3.5%, from 4.5%. Is the world investing in prevention? Peter Piot, a director at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, helped discover the virus nearly four decades ago. He says many unknowns remain around treatment, how Ebola causes death and how this can be prevented. Thus far, there is no proven treatment and no vaccine for Ebola, although one experimental drug has attracted interest after apparently saving the lives of two American missionaries infected. In March, America's National Institutes of Health awarded a five-year, $28 million grant to establish a collaboration between researchers from fifteen institutions who were working to fight Ebola. Other trials are also taking place, including by Tekmira, a Vancouver-based company that has a $140 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense to develop an Ebola drug. P