Only nine cases of Ebola were confirmed last week, the lowest weekly total this year and the latest evidence the outbreak is subsiding.
But in the midst of the victory comes the tough realization by public health officials that a lot went wrong in the response to the outbreak in West Africa last year.
A new independent panel and other critics found the World Health Organization, primarily tasked with coordinating the response, was woefully inadequate in its response.
The organization implemented the wrong strategy for communicating with residents in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, the West African countries hit hardest by Ebola. Liberia was recently deemed free of Ebola.
For instance, part of the reason Ebola spread so rampantly across the countries is the funeral and burial customs there. Ebola is spread through contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids, and the custom of washing a body before laying it to rest meant increased chances of infection.
“Essentially, bleak public messaging emphasized that no treatment [for Ebola] was available and reduced communities’ willingness to engage,” says the report from the independent panel released last week.
The World Health Organization issued warnings on the Ebola outbreak as early as April 2014, but that didn’t translate into action, the report said.
“The countries most affected, other WHO member states, the WHO secretariat and the wider global community were all ‘behind the curve’ of the rapid spread of the Ebola virus,” according to the panel.
The poor response is even more startling considering this isn’t the first time the organization has coordinated a public health outbreak, critics have said.
The panel still doesn’t know why it took the global body so long to declare a public health emergency, which it didn’t do until August 2014.
Since last year, the outbreak has killed more than 10,000 people, mostly in West Africa.
With cases dwindling, the discussion is shifting to what can be learned to prevent future outbreaks.
In the World Health Organization’s case, the group needs to create an entirely new entity tasked with emergency response, the report recommends. The entity would merge outbreak and humanitarian relief activities under one umbrella.
That would help create new streamlined systems to enable rapid action and deployment when the next disease outbreak occurs.
Experts have called for reforms to go even farther. An entirely new global health framework is needed to address future outbreaks, according to a panel of experts in an article in the journal Lancet last week.
The framework would require the involvement of national health organizations.
The World Health Organization also needs more funding to combat the next epidemic. The Ebola response had cost about $6 billion as of March, said Lawrence Gostin, one of the authors of the piece and faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health at George Washington University’s Law Center.
The WHO’s budget for 2014-2015 was $4 billion.
“The world is ill-prepared for the next epidemic,” Gostin said. “The need for advance funding, planning and coordination from the national health system up to WHO is at the heart of preparedness.”
In addition, more needs to be done to develop treatments for Ebola, according to Doctors Without Borders.
Earlier this week the group pushed for creation of a global health research and development fund to address gaps in Ebola and other problems such as antibiotic resistance.
The problem is current efforts to address these gaps are too fragmented and don’t address issues of affordability and access, the group said.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misidentified one of the countries hardest hit by Ebola. The Washington Examiner regrets the error.
