One of the leading international aid groups fighting Ebola overseas released a damning report Monday that claims that the outbreak has been worsened by “global inaction” and government failures.
On the one-year mark of the Ebola outbreak, dozens of volunteers with Doctors Without Borders slammed the international response to the disease as fatally slow and uncoordinated.
{mosads}“For the Ebola outbreak to spiral this far out of control required many institutions to fail. And they did, with tragic and avoidable consequences,” Christopher Stokes, the organization’s general director, wrote in the 22-page report.
The report included interviews from dozens of volunteers with Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), who have spent time recently in West Africa.
The group’s criticism was largely directed at the United Nations’ health arm, the World Health Organization, which staff members described as short-staffed and underfunded.
The doctors also blasted the lack of help from the United Nations — particularly the more than 2,000 members of the military who were deployed to the region. The military had been sent in at the request of groups like MSF, but staff members said their roles did not meet the sky-high demands of the countries.
“Much to MSF’s disappointment, the majority of the military effort deployed in October and November was limited to support, coordination and logistics for the efforts of international aid organisations and local authorities,” the report stated.
“There was a clear reluctance to jump in and care for patients. They wanted to help, but not to do anything risky,” added Dr. Joanne Liu, MSF’s international president. “US helicopters would not even transport laboratory samples or healthy personnel returning from treating patients.”
MSF has long been critical of the international response to the Ebola outbreak, which first began one year ago today. Since then, more than 10,000 people have died, nearly all in Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea.
While the outbreak has slowed since the peak last summer, new cases continue to emerge. Still, the head of the UN’s Ebola response offered hope Monday that the outbreak is nearly over.
“We have been running away from giving any specific date, but I am pretty sure myself that it will be gone by the summer,” Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the head of the UN’s Mission for Ebola Emergency Response, told the BBC.