A report was released which condemns the World Health Organization’s recent
handling of the Ebola epidemic according to The Guardian’s Health Editor, Sarah
Boseley. Reviewed by a group of 20 experts as part of a joint Harvard Global
Health Institute and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine endeavor,
the results of the analysis led to the recommendation that WHO “be stripped of
its role in declaring disease outbreaks to be an international emergency.” For
the future, the report delineates that a source outside the WHO’s politics
should be used for such declarations. Per the director of Harvard Global Health
Institute, Ashish Jha, ‘people at WHO were aware that there was an Ebola outbreak
that was getting out of control by spring…and yet it took until August to
declare a public health emergency. The cost of delay was enormous.’ Just as a
few new cases of Ebola have developed in Liberia, Jha and his collaborators are
insisting on a transparent and technically strong “emergency standing committee,”
which is “protected from political pressures” and has an ensured budget along
with accountability within WHO, to determine when an epidemic is an international-scale
risk. The experts are also advocating that the United Nations establish a committee
on global health to guarantee that “high-level political attention” is given to
such outbreaks when necessary. Calling on small countries to respond quicker to
these situations, the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine, Professor Peter Piot, hopes to ‘strengthen core capacities in all
countries to detect, report and respond rapidly to small outbreaks, in order to
prevent them from becoming large-scale emergencies.’
This really hits home given that we had our own Ebola-like virus to deal
with in our global simulation exercise. Diseases should definitely be respected
and handled in a way that will best limit their impact. It sounds as if there
was a lot learned from this Ebola epidemic which claimed 11,000 lives and is
still ongoing in Liberia. Hopefully, the new recommendations will avoid such a
tragedy in the future as people learn to put safety before any type of politics.
Amanda Zgonina
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