New Ebola outbreak in Liberia: 3 cases confirmed

The response to the Ebola crisis that emerged in West Africa in late 2013 was too slow, badly organised and caused the unnecessary deaths of more than 11,000 people; that’s the assessment of a team of British and American experts.

Kateh said investigations about the source of the virus’ resurgence are being carried out.

An global panel of experts is sharply critical of the response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa that began two years ago.

The unprecedented outbreak was more than 10 times larger than all previous known Ebola outbreaks combined.

Reviewing the global response to the epidemic which swept through Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the panel said such failures should not be allowed to happen again, and major reform is urgently needed to prevent future pandemics.

LUCY CARTER: Professor Ashish Jha is a director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and one of the authors of an independent report into the Ebola epidemic.

Three new cases of the deadly Ebola virus have been confirmed in Liberia, the country’s health ministry and World Health Organization said Friday, after the nation was declared Ebola free in September.

“We’re closer, but we’re not yet ready for another outbreak of this magnitude”, says epidemiologist David Heymann at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a member of the commission that produced the report. Cross-border transmission seems unlikely since neighbouring Guinea has zero cases while Sierra Leone was declared Ebola-free this month after 42 days without a case.

There have been other recent attempts to reform the WHO, notably after the SARS outbreak and the 2009 flu pandemic – which left a few countries arguing that the global health agency had overreacted.

Besides the reflection “on how and why the global response to the greatest Ebola calamity in human history was late, feeble and uncoordinated”, the panel studied ways to strengthen core capacities in all countries to detect, report and respond rapidly to contain small outbreaks.

“We’re closer, but we’re not yet ready for another outbreak of this magnitude”, said David Heymann, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Despite the return of the disease, the Health Minister is confident that the country will win the battle eventually.

“The Ebola outbreak is a stark reminder of the fragility of health security in an interdependent word”, the report reads, “and of the importance of building a more robust global system to protect all people from such risks”.

The report also calls for a dedicated research fund aimed at interventions for neglected diseases that afflict the poor, which generally hold little potential for profit.

One of the key proposals was the creation of a unified World Health Organization centre with “clear responsibility, adequate capacity, and strong lines of accountability for outbreak responses”.