The president of the World Bank today conceded that it wasn’t ready to fight the Ebola crisis and added that global health and financial organizations are still not ready to fight an outbreak of another viral disease.
“I think that what the Ebola epidemic has taught every single one of us is that we were not prepared for an outbreak of this size,” said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim from Liberia, the center of the Ebola fight.
“And if you consider, while Ebola is a terrible viral disease, it’s not as contagious as other viral illnesses, for example, that are airborne. There were outliers in SARS, for example, or a deadly pandemic flu which — either of which could happen literally at any time. Bird flu, swine flu, all of these problems could reoccur. And what we learned is that we’re not ready,” he added.
The bank was among the first to help fight the Ebola outbreak with money. It is now focused on helping build a medical infrastructure to handle Ebola and future epidemics and expand food production.
“We need Liberia to be in a position that’s better than it was in before the outbreak of the Ebola virus,” said Kim in comments distributed by the World Bank. “In order to do that, we need to really focus on infrastructure. We need to really focus on getting the health care system in place so that these kinds of problems don’t happen again, and we’ve really got to get the private sector moving.”
He added that world financial institutions are eager to put a medical early warning system in place to detect problems fast.
“We cannot leave any country unprepared,” said Kim. “We’ve got to build surveillance and protection systems, we have to build functioning public health systems. We have to build health care systems in every country in the world, in every village, to a level that we don’t allow this kind of problem to happen to again.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
