Why the WHO could not stop the Ebola outbreak

[magical thyme]

Worth reading. Interesting, WHO's good response to the SARS epidemic apparently was in large part due to massive donations from the wealthy because that threatened to impact their businesses. They haven't stepped forward this time around until just the past week or so. I still wonder if it's strictly racism, povertyism...or more nefarious. A depopulated Africa will be easier to exploit.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/09/16/why-the-who-has-failed-to-stop-the-ebola-outbreak/

It was last Tuesday when Olivet Buck got the news every doctor dreads. After months treating scores of Ebola-infected patients, the Sierra Leone physician had contracted it too. She had days to live. Local authorities found a hospital in Hamburg, Germany, that would care for Buck — perhaps even save her. But they needed money. So a desperate plea went out to the World Health Organization.

Even Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma begged in a letter, according to the Associated Press. The German hospital, he said, was in “readiness to receive her.”

But the WHO declined. And on Sunday, Buck died, the fourth Sierra Leone doctor to die of the disease. “I think it showed a callous lack of compassion for a devoted frontline clinician,” her brother told the Guardian. “Especially since there is now awareness of equipped units elsewhere to which other patients have been evacuated and successfully treated.”

It also showed something else. The WHO, which calls itself the “coordinating authority on international health work,” is underfunded and, critics say, ill-equipped to handle an unprecedented Ebola outbreak that has killed more than 2,400 and infected 4,784. The organization’s budget, snipped at by the global economic collapse and austerity measures, has shrunk by 12 percent in the past two years — and in all the wrong places to combat an Ebola outbreak.

According to Nature, the 2013 WHO budget “showed a shift away from infectious diseases,” cutting $72 million from that section. The Geneva office, where the organization is headquartered, took a significant hit. One office, which specialized in managing cultural differences in outbreak responses, was dissolved, according to the New York Times. Before the Ebola outbreak struck, there was only one remaining Ebola expert in the unit tasked with pandemic diseases.

[snagglepuss]

1. It was recorded last year that millions of pounds of Brit aid money may have been spent on mansions

and motors by officials in Sierra Leone, according to the country's anti-corruption commission. The Times reported the arrest of 29 officials, including seven doctors, last month. They include the director of primary healthcare at the Ministry of Health, the programme manager for reproductive health and the country’s chief medical officer Dr Kizito Daoh.

A DfID spokesman said that its funds to the country, which include £19.5m on child health, and a £16.5m project on reproductive, maternal and newborn health, went straight to health workers’ salaries.



This is not to say outside response has not been pathetic but African govts need to confront corruption.