LONDON (AP) — The World Health Organization said Saturday that it wouldn’t explain details contained in an internal document obtained by The Associated Press in which the U.N. health agency said it fumbled early attempts to contain the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
In the draft document, which wasn’t released publicly, WHO blamed numerous factors for the now explosive Ebola epidemic, including incompetent staff, bureaucracy and a lack of reliable information.
“WHO will not do interviews or explain details on this document until it is completed,” the health agency said in a statement Saturday. “WHO believes in transparency and accountability and will release this review when it is fact-checked.”
So far, Ebola has been blamed for 4,546 deaths in West Africa out of at least 9,191 cases. WHO estimated that there could be 10,000 cases every week by December unless stronger measures are enacted to fight the outbreak.
WHO said in the draft document that “nearly everyone” involved in the response to Ebola failed to notice factors that turned the outbreak into the biggest-ever on record.
When Doctors Without Borders warned in April that Ebola cases were out of control, a dispute on social media broke out between the charity and a WHO spokesman who insisted the virus was being contained.
According to the internal report, it was only in June that WHO’s chief, Dr. Margaret Chan, was alerted to the seriousness of the outbreak — and of the organization’s botched efforts in West Africa.
At a meeting of WHO’s network of outbreak experts in June, Dr. Bruce Aylward, normally in charge of polio eradication, emailed Chan about the major concerns being raised about WHO’s leadership in West Africa, telling her that some of the agency’s partners — including national health agencies and charities — believed WHO was “compromising rather than aiding” the response to Ebola.
In its statement on Saturday, WHO said it would conduct “a full review and analysis” of the global response to Ebola once the outbreak is over.
Canada’s government, meanwhile, said it will start shipping an experimental Ebola vaccine to WHO on Monday. Canada will send 800 vials of the vaccine in three shipments.
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And now WHO is admitting there might be 1.6 million cases and over a million deaths by the end of January. I guess that is what happens with you engage in social media spats rather than doing your job.
The best news in this story is the Canadians have come up with an experimental vaccine.
What is there to explain? The WHO and everyone else in the first world ignored this Ebola outbreak. They were, and probably still are, completely unprepared for it.
In fairness, I think it took everyone by surprise to some extent. For starters, it had never been reported from West Africa, and there are a lot of diseases there that have similar symptoms to Ebola. Even once it was identified, the largest previous outbreak infected only a little over 300 people. It’s the combination of dense population, cultural practices, and almost no health infrastructure from decades of war that made this into a perfect storm for it to fester and eventually take off.