Report blasts WHO on Ebola response

GENEVA, Switzerland, July 7 (UPI) -- The World Health Organization's response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa was slowed by office politics, a report released Tuesday contends.

It said WHO, a United Nations agency, was slow and underfunded in its response to the viral outbreak, beginning in 2013, in which over 11,000 people died. It added early warnings from groups such as Doctors Without Borders should have mobilized WHO sooner, and concluded that, while the Ebola epidemic eventually received notice, it came with little action or a coherent communications strategy.

The report was commissioned by WHO, and was led by Dame Barbara Stocking, former chief of the non-governmental humanitarian organization Oxfam.

"The panel considers that WHO does not currently possess the capacity or organizational culture to deliver a full emergency public health response," the report said.

"WHO does not have a culture of rapid decision-making and tends to adopt a reactive, rather than a proactive, approach to emergencies. In the early stages of the Ebola crisis, messages were sent by experienced staff at headquarters and the Regional Office for Africa, including after deployments in the field, about the seriousness of the crisis. Either these did not reach senior leaders or senior leaders did not recognize their significance. WHO does not have an organizational culture that supports open and critical dialogue between senior leaders and staff or that permits risk-taking or critical approaches to decision-making. There seems to have been a hope that the crisis could be managed by good diplomacy rather than by scaling up emergency action."

It added member nations share in the blame for the slow response, noting they have not fulfilled responsibilities which include data collection and surveillance to observe the spread of infectious diseases at early stages. The report also said WHO's budget does not include funds for emergency response, or a central command for emergency preparedness.