The board of the World Health Organization (WHO) agreed to set up a special fund for quicker response to health emergencies and outbreaks. This is after the organization received criticism for its slow response to the Ebola outbreak.
The announcement was made on Sunday at a meeting in Geneva. The senior health officials from 34 countries gave WHO Director-General Margaret Chan until May to prepare the funding needed and the reserve workforce that will be ready for deployment as soon as an outbreak begins, according to Bloomberg News.
Bruce Aylward, the agency's assistant director-general in charge of the response to Ebola, estimated that WHO needs a $100 million contingency fund and 1,500 people for its reserve workforce. The proposed contingency fund was brought up to WHO in 2011 during the height of the swine-flu pandemic, but the agency missed acting on it; therefore, it was caught off guard when Ebola emerged.
Other improvements that WHO plans to carry out are international coordination with countries that have health emergencies and the development of vaccines and drugs that should be ready for shipping when an outbreak emerge.
Chan considered Ebola a lesson not just to the world but also to WHO. More than 8,500 people lost their lives because of the outbreak, mostly in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia.
"This was West Africa's first experience with the virus and it delivered some horrific shocks and surprises," Chan said at the meeting. "The world, including WHO, was too slow to see what was unfolding before us. Ebola is a tragedy that has taught the world, including WHO, many lessons about how to prevent similar events in the future."
She then promised that Ebola will be the last disease outbreak in which the agency will be caught unprepared, BBC News reported.
"Never again should the world be caught by surprise, unprepared," Chan said.
