For poor countries, the facility “is a source of grant funding for an outbreak for which the beneficiaries do not pay any premiums,” he said.

The World Bank has made other funds available to respond to Ebola, including $300 million in grants and loans offered in July. The World Health Organization and its partners still need $287 million for public health operations in Congo, according to an email.

Ideally, more money would be available for countries to develop their own public health capacity, rather than depending on donors to help quell crises, said David Heymann, chairman of the WHO’s Strategic Technical Advisory Group on Infectious Hazards.

“We’re still in this mindset of ‘We’ll do it for you,”’ he said, “and we need to change that.

Still, as more countries focus on domestic issues and the number of governments willing to respond urgently to outbreaks abroad wanes, the need for sources of emergency funds is increasing, said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust in London.

Needs Tweaking?
Contributions to the United Nations are already struggling and often earmarked for specific causes, said Farrar, an infectious diseases researcher who spent years studying avian influenza in Ho Chi Minh City. While the World Bank’s bonds may not fill their envisioned role perfectly, the model should be adapted rather than discarded and started again, he said.

“Let’s say it didn’t exist,” he said. “Would nation-states provide the needed funding in the event of a pandemic? I wouldn’t be confident that they would. If it didn’t exist, we would probably have to invent it.”

Catastrophe bonds pay some of the highest coupons in the fixed-income world, and mostly attract specialist fund managers. Investors demand substantial yields to compensate for the risky and unpredictable nature of disasters. Losses are typically triggered by insurance claims, but the World Bank’s bond requires meeting a range of conditions.

Those conditions, such as the requirement for deaths in two countries, protect the pandemic insurance fund from inappropriate use, said Andre Rzym, a portfolio manager at Man AHL, which oversees $29.9 billion. The Congo’s Ebola epidemic is driven by non-medical issues that may not lead to global spread, he said.

‘Social Issue’
“Why is the current outbreak so serious in a single country?” he said. “It’s a societal issue; the real problem you have in DR Congo is political instability, violence and mistrust of authority.”