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The World Health Organization has admitted that it botched attempts to stop the now-spiraling Ebola outbreak in West Africa, blaming factors including incompetent staff and a lack of information.
"Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall," WHO said in a draft internal document obtained by The Associated Press, noting that experts should have realized that traditional containment methods wouldn't work in a region with porous borders and broken health systems.
The UN health agency acknowledged that, at times, even its own bureaucracy was a problem. It noted that the heads of WHO country offices in Africa are "politically motivated appointments" made by the WHO regional director for Africa, Dr. Luis Sambo, who does not answer to the agency's chief in Geneva, Dr. Margaret Chan.
'Not competent'
Dr. Peter Piot, the co-discoverer of the Ebola virus, agreed in an interview Friday that WHO acted far too slowly, largely because of its Africa office.
"It's the regional office in Africa that's the frontline," he said. "And they didn't do anything. That office is really not competent."
Piot also questioned why it took WHO five months and 1,000 deaths before the agency declared Ebola an international health emergency in August.
"I called for a state of emergency to be declared in July and for military operations to be deployed," he said. But he said WHO might have been scarred by its experience during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, when it was slammed for hyping the situation.
In late April, during a teleconference on Ebola among infectious disease experts that included WHO, Doctors Without Borders and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, questions were apparently raised about the performance of WHO experts, as not all of them bothered to send Ebola reports to WHO headquarters.
About 4,500 dead
WHO said it was "particularly alarming" that the head of its Guinea office refused to help get visas for an expert Ebola team to come in and $500,000 in aid was blocked by administrative hurdles. Guinea, along with Sierra Leone and Liberia, is one of the hardest-hit nations in the current outbreak, with 843 deaths so far blamed on Ebola.
The Ebola outbreak already has killed 4,484 people in West Africa and WHO has said within two months, there could be new 10,000 cases of Ebola every week.
When Doctors Without Borders began warning in April that the Ebola outbreak was out of control, a dispute on social media broke out between the charity and a WHO spokesman, who insisted the outbreak was under control.
At a meeting of WHO's network of outbreak experts in June, Dr. Bruce Aylward, normally in charge of polio eradication, alerted Chan about the serious concerns being raised about WHO's leadership in West Africa. He wrote an email that some of the agency's partners — including national health agencies and charities — believed the agency was "compromising rather than aiding" the response to Ebola and that "none of the news about WHO's performance is good."
Five days later, Chan received a six-page letter from the agency's network of experts, spelling out what they saw as severe shortcomings in WHO's response to the deadly virus.
"This (was) the first news of this sort to reach her," WHO said in the draft document. "She is shocked."
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Ebola is a huge and urgent global problem that demands a huge and urgent global response. (Craig Ruttle/Associated Press)
On Thursday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that a trust fund he launched to provide fast and flexible funding for the fight against Ebola has only $100,000 US in the bank.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the trust fund is part of a nearly $1 billion UN appeal for humanitarian needs in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the three countries hardest-hit by the deadly virus.
Ban urged the international community to respond to the appeal immediately, which he said will enable the United Nations "to get ahead of the curve and meet our target of reducing the rate of transmission by Dec. 1."
The World Health Organization said Thursday that the Ebola death toll will reach more than 4,500 this week, from among 9,000 people infected by the deadly disease. It has projected that there could be between 5,000 and 10,000 new cases a week in early December without urgent action.
A fundraising concert promoted by someone like U2 singer Bono would be welcome, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says. (J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)
Dujarric said donors may choose to give directly to a UN agency or a specific country, or they may channel their contribution through the trust fund which will allow the UN to allocate the funds where they are most urgently required at the time.
The secretary-general said the trust fund had received about $20 million, but the United Nations later clarified that the $20 million has been pledged, and only $100,000 has actually been received.
As of Thursday, Dujarric said the wider $1 billion UN appeal had received $376 million in pledges, about 38 per cent of the amount sought.
U2 concert possible
"Ebola is a huge and urgent global problem that demands a huge and urgent global response," Ban told reporters.
He said dozens of countries "are showing their solidarity," singling out the U.S., Britain, France, Canada, Germany, Poland, Japan, South Korea, Cuba and China. But he said it's time that countries that have "the capacity" — which he didn't identify — provide support.
The secretary-general said he liked the idea of greater public support for the fight against Ebola, including the possibility of a fundraising concert promoted by someone like U2 singer Bono.
"I would welcome any initiative taken by Mr. Bono or some other leaders around the world to join this campaign to mobilize funds and mobilize awareness to take urgent action all together and to show solidarity," Ban said.
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