Tue Mar 24, 2015 12:13am IST
(Updates with WHO quotes, and government responses)
By Misha Hussain
DAKAR, March 23 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The slowinternational response to the West Africa Ebola outbreak createdan avoidable tragedy that cost thousands of lives, a leadingmedical charity said on the one year anniversary of the firstconfirmed case.
The world's worst Ebola epidemic has killed over 10,200people in the three most affected countries of Guinea, Liberiaand Sierra Leone since March 2014 when it was first confirmed inthe forest region of Guinea.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which first raised the alarmover Ebola, said in a report that everyone from nationalgovernments to the World Health Organization (WHO) had createdbottlenecks that prevented the epidemic being quickly snuffedout.
"The Ebola outbreak has often been described as a perfectstorm: a cross-border epidemic in countries with weak publichealth systems that had never seen Ebola before," ChristopherStokes, MSF's general director, said in the report.
"Yet this is too convenient an explanation. For the Ebolaoutbreak to spiral this far out of control required manyinstitutions to fail. And they did, with tragic and avoidableconsequences."
In a scathing report titled "Pushed to the limit andbeyond", MSF said its warnings in June that the epidemic was outof control and that it could not respond on its own weredismissed as alarmist.
Guinea and Sierra Leone downplayed the epidemic and accusedMSF of spreading fear and panic. In June, the Sierra Leonegovernment told the WHO to report only lab-confirmed deaths -falsely reducing the death toll, the report said.
Kenema hospital in the southeast, where some of the firstcases were reported in Sierra Leone, also withheld crucialepidemiological data preventing MSF from identifying affectedvillages and responding, the report said.
"The Ministry of Health and the partners of Kenema hospitalrefused to share data or lists of contacts with us, so we wereworking in the dark while cases kept coming in," MSF's emergencycoordinator in Sierra Leone, Anja Wolz, said in the report.
The governments of Guinea and Sierra Leone were contactedabout the report by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, but did notcomment.
Liberia was transparent and asked for help almost on a dailybasis. MSF, which reported this to the WHO in June, said theoutbreak could have been halted if immediate action was taken,but these warnings were again ignored.
CRYING WOLF
Isabelle Nuttall, director of the WHO's Global Alert andResponses Network told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at theheight of the outbreak in September the WHO had been accused ofcrying wolf in the past.
In 2009, the WHO declared swine flu (H1N1) as a publichealth emergency of international concern (PHEIC), promptinggovernments to stock up on swine flu vaccines. The pandemic wasnot as severe as predicted and cost governments hundreds ofmillions of dollars in unused medicine.
Margaret Harris, WHO's Ebola spokesperson in Geneva saidthat only after infected Liberian Patrick Sawyer travelled byair to Nigeria in late July could the WHO consider Ebola as aPHEIC. The announcement came on Aug. 8, prompting a globalresponse.
However, by then the pandemic had spiralled out of control,MSF said. The agency branded the response a "global coalitionfor inaction" and said by the end of August, it had to turn awaypatients in Liberia leaving many to die in their homes or on thestreets.
"We had to make horrendous decisions about who we could letinto the centre," said MSF coordinator Rosa Crestani, who workedat the organization's Ebola centre in Monrovia, which could onlybe opened for 30 minutes a day because of the demand for beds.
"We could only offer very basic palliative care and therewere so many patients and so few staff that the staff had onaverage only one minute per patient. It was an indescribablehorror."
Internal differences also prevented MSF from workingtogether and deploying faster, resulting in just one of MSF'sfive operation units taking on the bulk of the response, Bricede la Vigne, head of operations for MSF Belgium, said in atelephone interview.
The number of Ebola cases dropped dramatically betweenNovember and January in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. Thepresidents of all three countries announced a target to reachzero Ebola by mid-April.
However, Guinea recently reported a doubling of cases in amonth, Sierra Leone has a whole neighbourhood under quarantineand Liberia announced on Friday its first new case 16 days afterits last Ebola patient was released.
The Ebola outbreak is not over until there are zero cases inthe region for 42 days, said MSF. (Reporting by Misha Hussain, Editing by Emma Batha)
(Updates with WHO quotes, and government responses)
By Misha Hussain
DAKAR, March 23 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The slowinternational response to the West Africa Ebola outbreak createdan avoidable tragedy that cost thousands of lives, a leadingmedical charity said on the one year anniversary of the firstconfirmed case.
The world's worst Ebola epidemic has killed over 10,200people in the three most affected countries of Guinea, Liberiaand Sierra Leone since March 2014 when it was first confirmed inthe forest region of Guinea.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which first raised the alarmover Ebola, said in a report that everyone from nationalgovernments to the World Health Organization (WHO) had createdbottlenecks that prevented the epidemic being quickly snuffedout.
"The Ebola outbreak has often been described as a perfectstorm: a cross-border epidemic in countries with weak publichealth systems that had never seen Ebola before," ChristopherStokes, MSF's general director, said in the report.
"Yet this is too convenient an explanation. For the Ebolaoutbreak to spiral this far out of control required manyinstitutions to fail. And they did, with tragic and avoidableconsequences."
In a scathing report titled "Pushed to the limit andbeyond", MSF said its warnings in June that the epidemic was outof control and that it could not respond on its own weredismissed as alarmist.
Guinea and Sierra Leone downplayed the epidemic and accusedMSF of spreading fear and panic. In June, the Sierra Leonegovernment told the WHO to report only lab-confirmed deaths -falsely reducing the death toll, the report said.
Kenema hospital in the southeast, where some of the firstcases were reported in Sierra Leone, also withheld crucialepidemiological data preventing MSF from identifying affectedvillages and responding, the report said.
"The Ministry of Health and the partners of Kenema hospitalrefused to share data or lists of contacts with us, so we wereworking in the dark while cases kept coming in," MSF's emergencycoordinator in Sierra Leone, Anja Wolz, said in the report.
The governments of Guinea and Sierra Leone were contactedabout the report by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, but did notcomment.
Liberia was transparent and asked for help almost on a dailybasis. MSF, which reported this to the WHO in June, said theoutbreak could have been halted if immediate action was taken,but these warnings were again ignored.
CRYING WOLF
Isabelle Nuttall, director of the WHO's Global Alert andResponses Network told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at theheight of the outbreak in September the WHO had been accused ofcrying wolf in the past.
In 2009, the WHO declared swine flu (H1N1) as a publichealth emergency of international concern (PHEIC), promptinggovernments to stock up on swine flu vaccines. The pandemic wasnot as severe as predicted and cost governments hundreds ofmillions of dollars in unused medicine.
Margaret Harris, WHO's Ebola spokesperson in Geneva saidthat only after infected Liberian Patrick Sawyer travelled byair to Nigeria in late July could the WHO consider Ebola as aPHEIC. The announcement came on Aug. 8, prompting a globalresponse.
However, by then the pandemic had spiralled out of control,MSF said. The agency branded the response a "global coalitionfor inaction" and said by the end of August, it had to turn awaypatients in Liberia leaving many to die in their homes or on thestreets.
"We had to make horrendous decisions about who we could letinto the centre," said MSF coordinator Rosa Crestani, who workedat the organization's Ebola centre in Monrovia, which could onlybe opened for 30 minutes a day because of the demand for beds.
"We could only offer very basic palliative care and therewere so many patients and so few staff that the staff had onaverage only one minute per patient. It was an indescribablehorror."
Internal differences also prevented MSF from workingtogether and deploying faster, resulting in just one of MSF'sfive operation units taking on the bulk of the response, Bricede la Vigne, head of operations for MSF Belgium, said in atelephone interview.
The number of Ebola cases dropped dramatically betweenNovember and January in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. Thepresidents of all three countries announced a target to reachzero Ebola by mid-April.
However, Guinea recently reported a doubling of cases in amonth, Sierra Leone has a whole neighbourhood under quarantineand Liberia announced on Friday its first new case 16 days afterits last Ebola patient was released.
The Ebola outbreak is not over until there are zero cases inthe region for 42 days, said MSF. (Reporting by Misha Hussain, Editing by Emma Batha)
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