When the biggest ever World Health Assembly (WHA) of the World Health Organization (WHO) meets in Geneva May 18–26, it will face a pivotal challenge: how to address the next big epidemic.
“Ebola is now a wake up call. The question is, will the world hit the snooze button?” said Josh Michaud, associate director of the Global Health Policy team at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Ebola is the latest emerging threat to world health, but it is not alone. The H1N1 strain of avian flu created a global pandemic in 2009. Polio, once nearly eliminated, is holding on, and the World Health Organization declared it an international threat in 2014. SARS and MERS are still around.
Any of them could morph into a modern plague. But if people prepare, much suffering can be prevented, according to Lawrence O. Gostin, JD, faculty director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University Law Center.
“Ebola taught us two fundamental lessons,” said Gostin.
The first lesson is that the world is unprepared for a global pandemic. Such a pandemic could be SARS, or MERS, or a crisis about antimicrobial resistance.
The second is that in the case of Ebola the world did not respond quickly or decisively to a crisis in poor countries. Ebola spread because of that slow response.
“The WHO we had was not the WHO we needed,” said Jimmy Kolker, assistant secretary for global affairs with Health and Human Services. He said WHO must “arrange for surge capacity,” to have people and money ready for the next emergency.
