Could the international community have done a better job when confronted with the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa? Although the virus appears to be largely contained now, this comes after at least 27,000 people were infected, with 11,000 of them dying. The virus also had the opportunity to spread within the human population for over a year, providing it a potentially dangerous opportunity to adapt to us as hosts.

To find out whether we could have managed the outbreak better, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently convened an Ebola Interim Assessment Panel, which analyzed various aspects of the organization’s response. This panel, commissioned by the WHO Director-General, included the Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, the founding Director of the UK's national Health Service, and other international public health leaders. It recently released its final report on the crisis.

UN NEWS CENTRE                                                                                June 2, 2015

To help mobilize needed resources “in the last mile of the response” against the Ebola outbreak and to start the affected West African countries on the path of early recovery, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today announced that he will convene an international conference next month.
In Sierra Leone, local health workers plan for the day ahead, as they continue their vigilance against Ebola. Photo: WHO/S. Aranda

“All of your investments, all of the sacrifices and lives lost, and all of the risks that the relief workers took would be squandered if the outbreak recurs,” Mr. Ban cautioned in his remarks to an informal plenary of the UN General Assembly on the Organization’s Ebola response efforts.

NEW SCIENTIST  Opinion                                   May 6, 2015

...HOW the world has changed. In 1948, the first commercial jet airliner was still a few years away from take-off, and the global population was just over 2 billion. Less than one-third lived in cities. Back then, safeguarding global health seemed an eminently manageable project. The newly formed United Nations agreed, and established the World Health Organization.

 Now, over half the planet's 7 billion people are packed into urban areas. Between us, we travel tens of billions of kilometres around the globe every year, with plenty of pathogens and parasites coming along for the ride. The WHO, largely unchanged since its creation, is ill-equipped to deal with the disease threats that this new world creates.

The recent Ebola outbreak is a case in point. Even the WHO's director-general, Margaret Chan, said her organisation was "overwhelmed" and admitted that a crisis on that scale "cannot be solved by a single agency".