WHO promises review of Ebola crisis once virus is under control
Print Edition
THE World Health Organization yesterday promised to publish a full review of its handling of the Ebola crisis once the outbreak is under control.
The announcement was a response to a leaked document that appeared to acknowledge that the organization had failed to do enough.
The WHO will not comment on the internal document cited in an Associated Press story on Friday, it said in a statement.
The document, a first draft that had not been fact-checked, was “part of an ongoing analysis of our response,” it said.
“We cannot divert our limited resources from the urgent response to do a detailed analysis of the past response. That review will come, but only after this outbreak is over,” the organization said.
The WHO has been widely criticized for its slow response to the epidemic and its early reassurances, despite repeated public warnings from medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, which was leading the fight against the virus on the ground.
Ebola has killed at least 4,546 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the WHO said on Friday. But with at least half the cases going unreported and a 70 percent fatality rate, by WHO estimates, the true toll is probably more than 12,000.
There is no sign of a slowdown in the outbreak, which was first confirmed in March, but not declared to be an international health emergency by the WHO until August 8.
WHO Director-General Margaret Chan has defended her handling of the epidemic, but the internal document cited by AP said experts should have realized that traditional containment methods wouldn’t work in a region with porous borders and broken health systems.
“Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall,” it said.
It added that WHO bureaucracy was also to blame, with the organization’s Africa head, Luis Sambo, appointed by African member countries, not by Chan.
In the early stages of the outbreak, messages from Sambo’s office were sometimes out of step with the line from Geneva. The African office declared Ebola to be “pretty much contained” in Senegal and Nigeria on September 22, a claim not backed up by Chan’s office, which only declared Senegal to be Ebola-free on Friday and has yet to say the same about Nigeria.
The document said also that one of Chan’s senior officials, Bruce Aylward, warned her by e-mail that some of the WHO’s partners felt it was “compromising rather than aiding” the Ebola response and that “none of the news about WHO’s performance is good.”
However, it was only five days later, on receiving an internal letter spelling out the WHO’s shortcomings, that Chan was “shocked” by “the first news of this sort to reach her,” the leaked document said.
“WHO will not do interviews or explain details on this document until it is completed,” yesterday’s statement said.
“A full review and analysis of global responses to this ... will be completed and made public once the outbreak is under control,” it said.
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