World Health Organizations (WHO) investigators were working to unlock the mystery of how a new cluster of cases emerged in Monrovia because there was no evidence yet of the usual factors, such as contact with a person suffering from Ebola, handling remains of an Ebola victim or traveling to a region where the virus is prevalent, said Margaret Harris, a spokeswoman for WHO.
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Liberia was initially proclaimed without ebola in May, yet new cases later developed.
Knowing at which stage Ebola is most likely to be transmitted, combined with the possibility of a new vaccine under development, means future outbreaks are unlikely to become the full-scale epidemic seen in western Africa, Professor Hunter said. “The lack of capacity to detect the virus for several months was a key failure, allowing Ebola eventually to spread to bordering Liberia and Sierra Leone”. “The cost of the delay was enormous”, said Jha.
Two months after Liberia was declared free of Ebola three confirmed cases of the deadly disease have emerged in the West African nation a media report said. While the panel demurred from advising the WHO on what programs it should cut, it did state firmly that responding to global health crises is one of the reasons the agency exists. “We have to engage in a sustained effort for as long as it takes to make sure the world is better prepared for the next pandemic”. Internal emails obtained by the Associated Press suggested that the World Health Organization was reluctant to declare the outbreak an emergency, fearing it would antagonize the affected countries.
“The most egregious failure was by WHO in the delay in sounding the alarm”, said Ashish K. Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.
Liberian panel member Mosoka Fallah of the campaign group Action Contre La Faim worldwide, said the human misery and deaths should prompt serious reflection “on how and why the global response to the greatest Ebola calamity in human history was late, feeble and uncoordinated”.
“In other words, will Ebola change the game?”
The panel doesn’t just criticize the response, though: the report also lays out a series of ten recommendations to “strengthen the global system for outbreak prevention and response”.
The analysis, published in The Lancet, provides ways to improve systems, with special focus on the World Health Organization (WHO).
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It also called for the creation of a unified WHO Center with clear responsibility, adequate capacity, and strong lines of accountability for outbreak response, and for a transparent, politically-protected standing emergency committee to take on responsibility for declaring emergencies. “We’ve had outbreaks like this before, and often you get thoughtful reviews, and august bodies that look at it, and people say, ‘We will get to this right away, ‘ and then other things draw our attention”.
