Disaster Response

WHO PRESS RELEASE                                                March 10, 2015

The WHO Director-General has commissioned a panel of outside independent experts to undertake an assessment on all aspects of WHO’s response in the Ebola outbreak. This is in response to a resolution passed during the Ebola Special Session of the Executive Board in January 2015.

Dame Barbara Stocking will chair the panel. She was formerly Chief Executive of Oxfam GB (2001-13) and during this time led major humanitarian responses. Currently she is President of Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, UK.

The other panel members are: Professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfun, Director-General of the National Institute for Biomedical Research, Democratic Republic of the Congo; Dr Faisal Shuaib, Head of the National Ebola Emergency Operations Center, Nigeria; Dr Carmencita Alberto-Banatin, independent consultant and advisor on health emergencies and disasters, Philippines; Professor Julio Frenk, Dean of the Faculty, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; and Professor Ilona Kickbusch, Director of the Global Health Programme at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland.

The panel will present a first progress report on its work to the 68th World Health Assembly in May 2015.

NBC NEWS  by Maggie Fox                                                                               Feb. 26, 2015

The United States fumbled its response to the Ebola epidemic before it even began, neglecting experiments to make vaccines and drugs against the virus, and cutting funding to key public health agencies, a presidential commission said Thursday.

Americans focused on their own almost nonexistent risk of catching Ebola from travelers instead of pressing to help the truly affected nations, the scathing report from the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues says.

They've been acting against their own best interest, the commission said in its report.

"Both justice and prudence demand that we do our part in combating such devastating outbreaks. Once we recognize our humanitarian obligations and the ability of infectious diseases to travel in our interconnected world, we cannot choose between the ethical and the prudential," it reads.

"Ethics and enlightened interest converge in calling for our country to address epidemics at their source."

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE-- by Mouctar Bah                                   Feb. 15, 2015                    

Conakry  - The leaders of the countries devastated by the west African Ebola outbreak vowed at a summit in Guinea on Sunday to eradicate the virus by mid-April.

A Guinea's health worker wearing protective suit holds masks at an Ebola Donka treatment centre in Conakry on December 8, 2014 (AFP Photo/Cellou Binani)

Guinea's President Alpha Conde and his Liberian and Sierra Leone counterparts Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Ernest Bai Koroma made the pledge after day-long closed talks in the Guinean capital Conakry.

Hadja Saran Daraba Kaba, the secretary-general of the Mano River Union bloc grouping the countries, said their presidents "commit to achieving zero Ebola infections within 60 days, effective today".

The summit came with infections having dropped rapidly across the countries, although the World Health Organization says Guinea and Sierra Leone remain a huge concern as both have seen a recent spike in new confirmed cases.

Read complete story.

One Lesson: Rush to Help, not to declare victory

EDITORIAL    THE WASHINGTON POST                                Jan. 31, 2015

THE WORLD’S tardy response to the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa, which has killed 8,810 people, demands that lessons be learned.

 Toward that end, a fresh batch of scientific reports has emerged in recent days to guide future responses. The World Health Organization, which stumbled in the initial period, seems to be recognizing its mistakes and looking for ways to correct them.... it is vital to keep medical interventions in place for long periods — and a big mistake to declare victory too early. The research also shows that most transmission of Ebola occurred in families....