The WHO bungled efforts to halt the spread of Ebola in west Africa, an internal report revealed on Friday, as US President Barack Obama named a trusted political adviser to take control of the US’ frenzied response to the epidemic.
The stepped-up scrutiny of the international response came as US officials rushed to cut off potential routes of infection from three cases in Texas, reaching a cruise ship in the Caribbean and multiple domestic airline flights.
Republican lawmakers and the Obama administration debated the value of restricting travelers from entering the US from countries where the outbreak began, without a resolution.
However, with US Secretary of State John Kerry renewing pleas for a “collective, global response” to a disease that has already killed more than 4,500 people in Africa, the WHO draft report pointed to serious errors by an agency designated as the international community’s leader in coordinating response to outbreaks of disease.
The document — a timeline of the outbreak — found that the WHO, an arm of the UN, missed chances to prevent Ebola from spreading soon after it was first diagnosed in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea last spring, blaming factors including incompetent staff and a lack of information.
Its own experts failed to grasp that traditional infectious disease containment methods would not work in a region with porous borders and broken health systems, the report found.
“Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall,” the WHO said in the report, obtained by The Associated Press. “A perfect storm was brewing, ready to burst open in full force.”
The agency’s own bureaucracy was part of the problem, the report found. It pointed out that the heads of its country offices in Africa are “politically motivated appointments” made by the WHO regional director for Africa, Luis Sambo, who does not answer to the agency’s head in Geneva, Margaret Chan (陳馮富珍).
After the WHO declared Ebola an international health emergency in August, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stepped in and had the UN take overall responsibility for fighting and eliminating the virus, among other things, setting up an emergency response mission based in Ghana.
The WHO declined to comment on the document, which was not issued publicly, and said that Chan would be unavailable for an interview with The Associated Press.
She did tell Bloomberg News that she “was not fully informed of the evolution of the outbreak. We responded, but our response may not have matched the scale of the outbreak and the complexity of the outbreak.”
Meanwhile, Obama moved to step up the US response to the disease, naming Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to US Vice President Joe Biden, as the administration’s point man on Ebola.
Klain is a longtime Democratic operative, who also served as a top aide to former US vice president Al Gore.
He does not have any medical or public health expertise. However, the White House said he would serve as “Ebola response coordinator,” suggesting his key role would be to synchronize the actions of many government agencies in combating the disease.
Other nations have taken steps to prevent travelers from the affected areas from crossing their borders. The Central American nation of Belize announced that it would immediately stop issuing visas to people from west African countries where Ebola had spread.
Officials said they were working to remove a hospital worker — who had handled an Ebola lab specimen — from a Caribbean cruise ship, although she had gone 19 days without showing any sign of the infection.
The Carnival Cruise Lines ship was headed back to its home port of Galveston, Texas, on Friday, after failing to get clearance to dock in Cozumel, Mexico, and officials in Belize would not allow the woman to leave the ship.
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