A total death toll of 11,000 due to Ebola could have been prevented if, yet the world remains "unacceptably underprepared" for another transmittable disease outbreak, per a damming BMJ report.
Researchers analyzing the global response to Ebola found that despite momentous efforts to address shortcomings, governments and humanitarian organizations have failed to tackle several critical issues dealing with the virus.
Despite It Being Declared Successful, WHO Still Unprepared
"We found remarkable consensus on what went wrong with the Ebola response and what we need to do to address the deficiencies. Hitherto, nearly not enough effort has been done," researchers from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies warned.
The report's authors said that the finding of the response to Ebola could be broken down into three categories: strengthening amenability with the International Health Regulations, improving study and fact-finding data sharing and improving the World Health Organisation.
They added that assets from helping countries' health infrastructures had been "derisory and hard to track", that sharing of patient samples "remain weak" and the efforts to correct the World Health Organization's (WHO) institutional incapacity "have been unkempt". The warning comes as the WHO's executive board meets this week to shortlist entrants for the director-general election.
"Ebola, and more recently Zika virus and yellow fever, have proved that we do not yet have a dependable or healthy global system for preventing, detecting, and answering to disease outbreaks," they report's authors wrote.
A petition to global community "is to mobilize greater properties and put in place monitoring and accountability mechanisms to guarantee we are better prepared for the next pandemic." "We will not be ready for the next epidemic without deeper and more wide-ranging change," the authors concluded.
WHO Needs More Intensive Study To Alter Ebola's Effects
Such as, the World Health Organization still has not settled on Merck vaccine an Emergency Use Assessment and Listing designation - its correspondent of the Food and Drug Administration's emergency use authorization - despite the fact that the company give in to an application in December 2015. (Johnson & Johnson, also developing an Ebola vaccine, and tried to submit its proposal last September; it hasn't received a presiding either.)
Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, the WHO assistant director-general whose division oversees this project, told STAT she expects the Merck vaccine to get an EUAL description within the next couple of months. But she added that once the outbreak in West Africa ended, so did the dimensions to bend rules just to speed up this work.
"It's not an emergency any longer. What happens when it's not an emergency is that the normal courses kick back in," she said. Feinberg said the burdens sketched in the report must be conquer, if the world wants vaccine makers to answer the call the next new infectious disease develops could be our first line of defense.
"If you can't figure it out for Ebola, there's no purpose to think that you're going to be able to figure that out for any other evolving infectious disease response," he said. "And unless the private sector of vaccine inventers - who are going to be critical cohorts in this effort - have self-assurance that you're going to be able to finish the job, then they're going to be much more uncertain to involved."
