The West African Ebola outbreak highlighted leadership failings of the World Health Organisation (WHO), said analysts Thursday who called for sweeping reforms and a doubling of its budget to prevent "needless" deaths in future. Researchers from the Washington-based O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law said the UN's health organ urgently needed an injection of cash and expertise to boost its capacity and credibility.
"Action now on WHO and other reforms to the global health system is crucial, before the political moment passes," the research institute's Lawrence Gostin and Eric Friedman wrote in The Lancet medical journal. They called for the body's 2014-15 budget of less than $4 billion (3.5 billion euros) to be doubled over five years, to allow it to attract and retain expert personnel.
They also proposed the creation of a separate contingency fund ready to be tapped into as soon as the next epidemic is identified. "Inadequate epidemic preparedness funding has been and will continue to be, unwise," said the paper. Earlier Thursday, the WHO said the Ebola death toll in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea now topped 11,000 - almost half of the more than 26,500 people infected in the worst outbreak of the haemorrhagic virus ever recorded.
The WHO had previously acknowledged its response was slow. Gostin and Friedman said the problem had several origins. In May 2011, the WHO saw its budget slashed by $500 million (440 million euros), the loss of 300 headquarter jobs and nearly two-thirds of its emergency response unit staff, they wrote.
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