New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
Accessed 6 September 2014

Cuts at W.H.O. Hurt Response to Ebola Crisis
SHERI FINK
3 September 2014

With treatment centers overflowing, and alarmingly little being done to stop Ebola from sweeping through West African villages and towns, Dr. Joanne Liu, the president of Doctors Without Borders, knew that the epidemic had spun out of control.

The only person she could think of with the authority to intensify the global effort was Dr. Margaret Chan, the director general of the World Health Organization, which has a long history of fighting outbreaks. If the W.H.O., the main United Nations health agency, could not quickly muster an army of experts and health workers to combat an outbreak overtaking some of the world’s poorest countries, then what entity in the world would do it?

“I wish I could do that,” Dr. Chan said when the two met at the W.H.O.’s headquarters in Geneva this summer, months after the outbreak burgeoned in a Guinean rain forest and spilled into packed capital cities. The W.H.O. simply did not have the staffing or ability to flood the Ebola zone with help, said Dr. Chan, who recounted the conversation. It was a fantasy, she argued, to think of the W.H.O. as a first responder ready to lead the fight against deadly outbreaks around the world.

The Ebola epidemic has exposed gaping holes in the ability to tackle outbreaks in an increasingly interconnected world, where diseases can quickly spread from remote villages to cities housing millions of people.

The W.H.O., the United Nations agency assigned in its constitution to direct international health efforts, tackle epidemics and help in emergencies, has been badly weakened by budget cuts in recent years, hobbling its ability to respond in parts of the world that need it most. Its outbreak and emergency response units have been slashed, veterans who led previous fights against Ebola and other diseases have left, and scores of positions have been eliminated — precisely the kind of people and efforts that might have helped blunt the outbreak in West Africa before it ballooned into the worst Ebola epidemic ever recorded…