Lack of communication, poor responsiveness, poor management of the emergency situation. The college of experts mandated by the UN on the management of the Ebola epidemic is not kind to the WHO. Their report points to major shortcomings, and implicitly, the partial responsibility of the World Health Organization in the difficulty in controlling the virus.
In the three West African countries, Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, the infectious disease claimed the lives of 11,000 people. Experts are now trying to understand how we arrived at such a heavy human toll.
The first conclusions underline the dysfunctions of the WHO and the slowness to measure the extent of the problem. The conclusion is bitter: “the early warnings issued from May to June 2014 did not lead to an adequate and serious response”, write the authors quoted by Europe 1. “It is surprising that it was necessary to wait until August or September to recognize that the transmission of Ebola could only be under control if surveillance measures, mobilization of the populations and the distribution of care were put in place simultaneously”. It was only on August 8, 2014 that the WHO declared Ebola a “global public health emergency”.
The UN is not the first to denounce this relative deafness in the face of numerous humanitarian alarms. Last March, Doctors Without Borders clearly attacked the WHO, asserting that it was up to it “to fight the virus, not [à] MSF”. However, the NGO had also questioned itself, recognizing a lack of preparation in the face of an exceptional situation.
This new UN report and MSF’s denunciations will be debated at the World Health Assembly, from May 18 to 26, in Geneva. This meeting should enable WHO member countries to learn lessons. Objective: to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
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