W.H.O. Leader Outlines Changes in Response to Ebola Epidemic
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Version 0 of 1. GENEVA — The World Health Organization must act to ensure it will not be caught flat-footed by future crises the way it was by the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the organization’s director general said on Monday. “I do not ever again want to see this organization faced with a situation it is not prepared, staffed, funded or administratively set up to manage,” the director general, Dr. Margaret Chan, said at the start of a 10-day meeting of the organization’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly. As expected, Dr. Chan proposed an overhaul of the organization’s emergency response system, intended to make it faster and more effective. The measures would create a dedicated health emergency work force reporting to the director, with a $100 million contingency fund, and would streamline the organization’s procedures for hiring staff, purchasing supplies and moving them swiftly to where they are needed. Dr. Chan spoke frankly about the shortcomings of the international response to the Ebola outbreak, which has killed more than 11,000 people. “W.H.O. was overwhelmed, as were all other responders,” Dr. Chan said. “The demands on W.H.O. were more than 10 times greater than ever experienced in the history of this organization.” The proposals have helped to stave off suggestions that a new institution should be created to take the lead in tackling health emergencies. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who opened the assembly with a speech on Monday, called the W.H.O. “the only international organization that has universal political legitimacy on global health issues.” A United Nations panel examining the organization’s response to Ebola said last week that it was still unclear why it took so long to act on warnings about the severity of the outbreak. But it too came down firmly against creating another organization to handle emergencies. “This is a unique time in history, where economic progress is actually increasing threats to health instead of reducing them,” Dr. Chan said on Monday, noting the burden of rising health care costs, the global marketing of unhealthy products and the rise of lifestyle-related diseases. The assembly’s agenda also includes proposals for combating what Jane Ellison, Britain’s health minister, called “the steady onward march towards the catastrophe” of antibiotic drug resistance. Some 25,000 people a year die in the European Union alone from infections by drug-resistant bacteria, a draft plan said. Drug companies have not produced a major new class of antibiotics in more than a quarter of a century, the plan noted, while existing drugs have been losing effectiveness. The trend is “raising the specter of a post-antibiotic era in which common infections will once again kill,” Dr. Chan said. |