Ebola Outbreak News 2015: Slow International Response Costs Thousands of Lives – M.S.F.
A top medical charity organization has criticized the turtle-paced response of the international community, including the World Health Organization, to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, saying such has cost thousands of lives when the tragedy could have been avoided.
The latest Ebola Situation Report of the W.H.O. dated March 18 showed that since last year, Ebola has claimed 10,194 lives, of whom 4,264 are from Liberia, 3,691 from Sierra Leone, and 2,224 from Guinea.
There have been 24,701 cases of Ebola, the report also showed.
On the first year anniversary of the first confirmed Ebola case, Medecins Sans Frontieres (M.S.F.), which first raised the alarm over the virus, said in a report titled "Pushed to the limit and beyond" that national governments and the W.H.O. had "created bottlenecks that prevented the epidemic being quickly snuffed out," Reuters reported on Sunday.
"The Ebola outbreak has often been described as a perfect storm: a cross-border epidemic in countries with weak public health systems that had never seen Ebola before," Christopher Stokes, M.S.F.'s general director, said in the report.
"Yet this is too convenient an explanation. For the Ebola outbreak to spiral this far out of control required many institutions to fail. And they did, with tragic and avoidable consequences," Stokes said.
The M.S.F. said the warnings it issued in June that the epidemic was out of control were initially dismissed as alarmist, with Guinea and Sierra Leone even accusing M.S.F. of spreading fear and panic.
The Sierra Leone government told the W.H.O. in June to report only lab-confirmed deaths, which the report said falsely decreased the death toll.
Kenema hospital, where some of the first cases were reported in Sierra Leone, also withheld crucial epidemiological data which prevented M.S.F. from identifying affected villages and responding.
"The Ministry of Health and the partners of Kenema hospital refused to share data or lists of contacts with us, so we were working in the dark while cases kept coming in," M.S.F. emergency coordinator in Sierra Leone, Anja Wolz, said in the report.
Liberia, on the other hand, was transparent and asked for help almost every day.
However, the W.H.O. again ignored warnings by the M.S.F., which said the outbreak could have been nipped in the bud if response was immediate.
The M.S.F. said that the W.H.O. rejected its assessment when the former first declared the existence of an Ebola outbreak at the end of March. The latter only declared a public health emergency in August last year, which then rolled a late international response that the M.S.F. described as a "global coalition for inaction."
By the end of that month, M.S.F. said it had to make "horrendous decision" of selecting its patients because of the overwhelming number, leaving many who had the virus to die.
"We had to make horrendous decisions about who we could let into the center," M.S.F. coordinator Rosa Crestani was quoted as saying.
Crestani worked at the M.S.F. Ebola center in Monrovia, which was only open for half an hour a day because of the demand for beds.
"We could only offer very basic palliative care and there were so many patients and so few staff that the staff had on average only one minute per patient. It was an indescribable horror," Crestani said.