The chlorine was expired. The protective gear was missing. And the red tape was so thick that responders fighting last year’s Ebola outbreak had trouble getting approval for boots and buckets.
Last year’s Ebola epidemic pitted a lethal virus against barely-there health systems, and it was always going to be deadly. However, an Associated Press investigation has found that a string of avoidable errors badly undermined the work of international aid workers.
The WHO, charged with leading the fight against global outbreaks, already has been criticized over its management of the disease-fighting effort. Earlier this year, an AP investigation found that the WHO delayed declaring an international emergency — similar to an SOS signal — on political and economic grounds. Newly obtained e-mails, documents and interviews show that the WHO and other responders failed to organize a strong response even after the signal was issued.
Photo: AP
Experts say that the bungling ultimately cost lives.
“There’s no question that a better and earlier response from WHO could have resulted in thousands and thousands of fewer deaths than we saw,” said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University in New York.
Kenema is a diamond town whose potholed roads turn to red sludge in the rainy season. Experts and insiders say the chaotic response there last year was a microcosm of the Ebola-fighting efforts across West Africa as the disease spiraled out of control.
To date, Ebola has killed more than 11,000 people and officials estimate the epidemic won’t be stopped before the end of the year.
As Ebola cases climbed in July last year, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan (陳馮富珍) identified Kenema as one of two priority areas.
“Transportation, PPE [personal protective equipment] and other equipment must [be] provided,” she wrote on July 24 last year.
However, staffers regularly received expired or questionable chlorine, incidents that spooked an already rattled staff.
Nurse Donnell Tholley said workers sometimes resorted to donning ill-fitting gloves for their hands and stray plastic packaging on their feet — instead of the tall protective rubber boots they needed.
More than 40 health workers died and others abandoned the hospital out of fear.
Joseph Fair, a US disease expert in Freetown advising the Sierra Leonean government, described the WHO as “paralyzed,” recalling interminable conference calls debating things like the color of body bags.
The situation at Kenema Government Hospital was horrific — blood-drenched patients lay in agony in understaffed wards and WHO staffers made repeated requests for support that went unanswered. Other aid workers declined to work there, citing the dangerous conditions; there was virtually no triage and patients often were shuffled to the Ebola ward with incomprehensible slips of paper.
When the Red Cross offered to build an Ebola treatment center to alleviate the pressure on the hospital, it was held up because no one in Sierra Leone’s government or the WHO could tell them where to build it.
“We are at risk of very poor perception by the public when we send in IFRC [International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies] then block their ability to care for patients,” the WHO’s Ian Norton wrote in a note to his colleagues.
By the time the clinic was finally built, the peak of the outbreak in Kenema had passed. Twenty health workers were infected in the interim.
Many patients who succumbed to the virus were buried in a cemetery behind the clinic, their graves marked with numbers instead of names.
Bruce Aylward, the WHO’s top Ebola official, said it was common for Ebola treatment centers to be caught up in political wrangling.
“Undoubtedly in some cases there was bureaucracy,” he said.
However, he said it was wrong to lay the blame at the WHO’s door.
“These were government decisions at the end of the day,” he said.
Complaints about the WHO’s leadership focused in part on Jacob Mufunda, the agency’s top representative in Sierra Leone.
Requests to fix critical problems like the hospital’s shaky generator regularly went unfulfilled by Mufunda’s office, leaving staffers to cover thousands of dollars’ worth of expenses out of their own pockets, according to two people who were there at the time, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press.
An e-mail from Chan, which AP obtained, corroborates allegations of tight-fistedness, not just in Kenema, but across West Africa.
Chan told Mufunda and other senior officials that only a tiny fraction of needed cash was being released and that the problem had festered for four months.
“I expect all our colleagues ... to facilitate experts and staff to do their field work and not to post barriers because business as usual does not work during crisis,” she wrote.
Mufunda, who was reassigned to run the WHO’s office in Mozambique shortly thereafter, did not return messages seeking comment.
The problems that hamstrung the Ebola response have prompted soul-searching at the WHO and across the public health community.
Two months ago, a WHO-commissioned panel criticized the organization’s lack of leadership, but did not mention the logistical problems uncovered by AP.
All of the top leaders at WHO during the Ebola outbreak remain on the payroll, except for its Africa director, who retired after serving out his term. That has left many outside the WHO dismayed.
“I personally would have no confidence that the same team at WHO would be able to handle the next international outbreak,” Redlener said. “We’ve already seen what the old leadership at WHO has been able to do so I don’t know why we would expect them to be able to right themselves.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion