W.H.O. Declares Ebola
in West Africa a Health
Emergency
By ALAN COWELL
AUGUST 8, 2014
LONDON — Facing the worst known
outbreak of the Ebola virus, with
almost 1,000 fatalities in West Africa,
the World Health Organization
declared an international public
health emergency on Friday,
demanding an “extraordinary”
response — only the third such
declaration of its kind since
regulations permitting such alarms
were adopted in 2007.
The organization stopped short of
saying there should be general
international travel or trade bans, but
acknowledged that the outbreak,
already in its sixth month, was far
from being contained.
One major international medical
organization, Doctors Without
Borders, responded to the statement
with a renewed call for a “massive
deployment” of health specialists to
the stricken countries. “Lives are
being lost because the response is too
slow,” it said.
Margaret Chan, the World Health
Organization's director general, told a
news conference at the body's Geneva
headquarters: “This is the largest,
most severe, most complex outbreak in
the nearly four-decade history of the
disease.”
“I am declaring the current outbreak
of the Ebola virus disease a public
health emergency of international
concern,” she added. “Countries
affected to date simply don’t have the
capacity to manage an outbreak on
this scale on their own.”
Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the W.H.O.'s head of
health security, said that “things will
get worse for a while,” and, “we are
fully prepared for addressing this for
some months.”
The W.H.O. urged all states where the
disease is spreading to declare a state
of emergency, to screen all people
leaving at international airports,
seaports and land crossings, and to
prevent travel by anyone suspected of
having the Ebola virus. The move is
aimed at containing the disease. But
the organization did not recommend a
ban on travel to or from places with
outbreaks because of the low risk of
infection. “We don’t believe a general
ban on that kind of travel makes any
kind of sense at all,” Dr. Fukuda said.
The declaration was apparently
intended to display a more aggressive
stance by the health organization. In
the past, it has often bent to pressure
from member states demanding that
there be no consequences even as
epidemics have raged inside their
borders and sometimes slipped over
them.
But health specialists remain critical
of the international response.
“Declaring Ebola an international
public health emergency shows how
seriously W.H.O. is taking the current
outbreak; but statements won’t save
lives,” said Bart Janssens, the director
of operations at Doctors Without
Borders, which says it has hundreds of
specialists in the field in West Africa.
“Countries possessing necessary
capacities must immediately dispatch
available infectious disease experts
and disaster relief assets to the
region,” he said in a statement. “It is
clear the epidemic will not be
contained without a massive
deployment on the ground from these
states.”
According to figures released by the
W.H.O. this week, the virus has
claimed 932 lives since March. Most of
the cases are in Guinea, Liberia and
Sierra Leone, but nine cases have also
been reported in Nigeria, where one
person died after traveling there from
Liberia.
The total number of confirmed,
probable and suspected cases,
including the fatalities, was 1,711.
“A coordinated international response
is deemed essential to stop and
reverse the international spread of
Ebola,” the W.H.O. said in a
statement after a two-day meeting of
its emergency committee on the
outbreak.
The statement called the spread of the
disease an “extraordinary event,”
describing the potential consequences
as “particularly serious.” There is no
licensed protocol of treatment or
vaccine to halt the disease.
The W.H.O. listed a series of
worrisome factors in its spread,
including “the virulence of the virus,
the intensive community and health
facility transmission patterns, and the
weak health systems in the currently
affected and most at-risk countries.”
The W.H.O. made similar emergency
declarations to counter swine flu in
2009 and polio in May. But public
health experts say the declaration on
polio has not reversed or slowed its
international spread.
In dealing with the Ebola crisis, the
W.H.O. said on Friday, stricken
countries faced an array of challenges,
with “fragile” health services backed
by few resources, and inexperienced
personnel confronting
“misperceptions” of the disease among
highly mobile populations. “A high
number of infections have been
identified among health care workers,
highlighting inadequate infection
control practices in many facilities,”
the statement said.
But the body also said that the disease
could be contained. “This is not a
mysterious disease,” Dr. Fukuda said
in a telephone briefing with
journalists. “This is an infectious
disease that can be contained. It is not
a virus that is spread through the air.”
Ms. Chan said she hoped that Friday’s
declaration would “galvanize” leaders
of all countries to act. “It cannot be
done by the ministries of health
alone,” she said.
Also on Friday, news reports said a
suspected case of Ebola had been
detected in Uganda, the first such
report from East Africa. A traveler
from South Sudan was isolated with
Ebola-like symptoms of fever, and
physicians were awaiting the results of
tests, airport officials were quoted as
saying. Uganda’s last known outbreak
of Ebola was in 2012. Earlier
suspicions that Ebola had reached
Uganda in late July were dismissed as
a false alarm.
In Europe, a Spanish citizen, the only
known European to contract the
disease, has been flown home from
Liberia for medical attention. The
European Union said on Friday that
the risk to Europeans remained
“extremely low.”
Sheik Umar Khan, the Sierra Leonean doctor hailed as a
“national hero” for treating more than one hundred Ebola patients, died
today of the same disease.
