Via The Guardian: Book lifts lid on litany of mistakes in Ebola outbreak that killed 11,300 people. Excerpt:
A British doctor and Irish diplomat who worked on the frontline of the crisis in west Africa in 2014 say failures by international aid agencies and donors exacerbated the catastrophe.
The World Health Organization and other global agencies have failed to learn sufficient lessons from the 2014 Ebola outbreak that killed more than 11,300 people in west Africa, a British doctor at the centre of the battle in Sierra Leone has said.
Although the response to the most recent Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was swift and effective, the international community’s long-term strategies have only marginally changed, said Oliver Johnson, who in a book with Irish diplomat Sinead Walsh lifts the lid on the extraordinary behind-the-scene failures four years ago.
In Getting to Zero, the duo show how a litany of mistakes made in distant offices in New York, Washington, London and Geneva, combined with poor leadership in Sierra Leone and a weak health service, created a catastrophe that could have been prevented.
Among those coming under fire are the British army, the Department for International Development and the US Center for Disease Control.
The sharpest criticism is levelled at the WHO, which was slow to declare the Ebola outbreak an international emergency, but also failed to heed early alarm calls made by medics who were working in horrific conditions in the Kenema hospital, where British nurse Will Pooley contracted the virus.
“WHO Kenema staff were screaming for months … but WHO leadership failed to take adequate action,” the authors note in the book.
“Despite the enormous furore over their failures on Ebola, WHO has not initiated any other significant reforms,” they add.
Through 85 interviews with responders, politicians and witnesses, Johnson and Walsh give first-hand accounts of the world’s failure to respond to Ebola in the first few months in 2014 – inaction that ultimately cost the lives of thousands.
