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Independent Ebola Report: Not Listening to Civil Society Caused Thousands of Deaths, Notes AHFAn independent group of 19 experts from around the globe, convened by the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI) and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, has issued a hard-hitting analysis of the global response to the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. The report offers 10 major reform proposals to prevent future such catastrophes, with emphasis on: preventing major disease outbreaks; responding to outbreaks; the production and sharing of research data, knowledge, and technologies; and ways to improve the governance of the global health system, with a focus on the World Health Organization (WHO). The members of the Harvard Global Health Institute-London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Independent Panel on the Global Response to Ebola concluded that while the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak "engendered acts of outstanding courage and solidarity," it also caused "immense human suffering, fear and chaos, largely unchecked by high level political leadership or reliable and rapid institutional responses." Panel members come from academic institutions, think tanks and civil society, with expertise in Ebola, disease outbreaks, public and global health, international law, development and humanitarian assistance, and national and global governance. The Panel was chaired by Professor Peter Piot, Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and co-discoverer of the Ebola virus. Professor Piot said: "We need to strengthen core capacities in all countries to detect, report and respond rapidly to small outbreaks, in order to prevent them from becoming large-scale emergencies. Major reform of national and global systems to respond to epidemics are not only feasible, but also essential so that we do not witness such depths of suffering, death and social and economic havoc in future epidemics. The AIDS pandemic put global health on the world's agenda. The Ebola crisis in West Africa should now be an equal game changer for how the world prevents and responds to future epidemics." In addition to over 11,000 deaths from Ebola, the epidemic "brought national health systems to a halt, rolled back hard-won social and economic gains in a region recovering from civil wars, sparked worldwide panic, and cost several billion dollars in short-term control efforts and economic losses." "The most egregious failure was by WHO in the delay in sounding the alarm," said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, K.T. Li Professor of International Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Harvard Chan) and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "People at WHO were aware that there was an Ebola outbreak that was getting out of control by spring…and yet, it took until August to declare a public health emergency. The cost of the delay was enormous," said Jha. The report's 10 recommendations provide a roadmap to strengthen the global system for outbreak prevention and response:
According to Liberian Panel member Mosoka Fallah, Ph.D., MPH, of Action Contre La Faim International (ACF). "The human misery and deaths from the Ebola epidemic in West Africa demand a team of independent thinkers to serve as a mirror of reflection on how and why the global response to the greatest Ebola calamity in human history was late, feeble and uncoordinated. The threats of infectious disease anywhere is the threat of infectious disease everywhere," Fallah said. "The world has become one big village." "We gathered world-class experts and asked, how can we bolster the dangerously fragile global system for outbreak response?" said the Panel's Study Director, Dr. Suerie Moon, MPA, PhD of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Kennedy School. "Now, the billion-dollar question is whether political leaders will demand the difficult but necessary reforms needed before the next pandemic. In other words, will Ebola change the game?" "There is a high risk that we will fail to learn our lessons," added the Harvard Global Health Institute's Ashish Jha. "We've had big outbreaks before and even careful reviews after, but often the world gets distracted. We owe it to the more than 11,000 people who died in West Africa to see that that doesn't happen this time." Finally, a non-member of the Panel, Michael Weinstein, President of AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), commented that in August 2014, when Miata Jambawai, AHF's Country Program Manager in Sierra Leone-where AHF has free AIDS treatment clinics-requested technical information from WHO related to personal protective gear (gloves, gowns, masks, booties, etc.) a fact mentioned in the Report, the response from WHO was close to null and Ms. Jambawai and her team in Sierra Leone needed to find out other sources of information, primarily via MSF. Mr. Weinstein considers that the Independent Panel Report on Ebola has highlighted sufficient evidence to openly request not just a profound reform of WHO but also a change of its Director General, Dr. Margaret Chan, in order to ensure that critically needed reforms happen in a rapid manner and without WHO's resistance to the changes. If you wish to provide a link to this paper for your readers, please use the following, which will go live at the time the embargo lifts: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)00946-0/fulltext Media Interviews:
For interviews with Professor Peter Piot, please contact: London
School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine press office [email protected]
or +44 (0) 207 927 2802. Notes to Editors: Members of the Panel
About the Harvard Global Health Institute, (HGHI) connects global health research and education across Harvard University and with partners around the world. The Institute's mission is to stimulate research, leverage the University's expertise and convening power, and facilitate connections across disciplines and sectors that will lead to better health outcomes for the world's population. http://globalhealth.harvard.edu About the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine-The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine is a world-leading centre for research and postgraduate education in public and global health, with 3,900 students and more than 1,000 staff working in over 100 countries. The School is one of the highest-rated research institutions in the UK, and was recently cited as the world's leading research-focused graduate school. Our mission is to improve health and health equity in the UK and worldwide; working in partnership to achieve excellence in public and global health research, education and translation of knowledge into policy and practice. www.lshtm.ac.uk About AIDS Healthcare Foundation, is the largest international HIV NGO, currently providing HIV care and prevention services to more than 500,000 patients in 36 countries, including Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone. www.aidshealth.org
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