The World Health Organization waffled on its response to the Ebola outbreak, causing more than 1,000 people in West Africa to die, a new report claims.
The aid group Doctors Without Borders warned the WHO on March 31, 2014, that Ebola was out of control in West Africa. However, the agency didn’t declare a public health emergency until August after several cases were discovered in the U.S. and Europe, according to a scathing report from the group.
“When Ebola became an international security threat, and no longer a humanitarian crisis affecting a handful of poor countries in West Africa, finally the world began to wake up,” Dr. Joanne Liu, Doctors Without Borders president, said in the report released on Sunday.
The report was released in the wake of damaging internal documents that showed the WHO was slow in declaring Ebola a public health emergency, which frees up funds to combat the virus. The WHO was receiving e-mails from aid workers in West Africa by mid-April 2014 but delayed the declaration, according to the Associated Press.
The agency did not return a request for comment.
The group said it heard of the first case of Ebola on March 14, 2014, in Guinea. A few weeks later, the group told the WHO the Ebola outbreak was “unprecedented” due to the geographic spread of cases, as the virus quickly jumped from the forests of Guinea to the country’s capital.
However, Doctors Without Borders said its warnings fell on deaf ears.
“Today, describing the epidemic as ‘unprecedented’ is stating the obvious, though for months [the group] felt alone in this analysis,” the report said.
The outbreak has claimed more than 10,000 lives, a majority from the West African countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, according to the WHO.
