After withering criticism for letting the Ebola outbreak spiral out of control, the World Health Organization’s director is pushing for several reforms.
The WHO will create a global health emergency workforce, which will focus on first responders and take the lead on emergency outbreaks, Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan said Monday at the opening of the organization’s assembly.
The United Nations agency has taken heat from an independent panel that found it was not prepared and dawdled before declaring the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a public health emergency. The outbreak has largely subsided, but not before killing more than 10,000 people, primarily in West Africa.
The panel recommended the creation of a new entity tasked with only emergency response.
Chan said on Twitter that she is also proposing a new $100 million contingency fund for funding responses to future outbreaks and emergencies.
She took the floor after German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for a better command structure to combat a future crisis, according to a report in Reuters.
Chan also called for the assembly to approve a global action plan on antibiotic resistance, a growing public health issue.
More and more first- and second-line antibiotics failed, Chan said.
At the same time, people are becoming more resistant to the antibiotics that are available due to overprescribing and overuse in livestock.
