OUT OF CONTROL: How the world’s health organizations failed to stop the Ebola Disaster

WASHINGTON POST's  detailed front page account of how the Ebola epidemic got out of control in West Africa.  Oct. 5, 2014

     by Lena Sun, Bradly Dennis, Lenny Bernstein and Joel Achenbach

The glow from a crematorium lights the sky as the bodies of people who died from Ebola are cremated last month in Monrovia

---Michel Du Cille, THE WASHINGTON POST

.... "The virus easily outran the plodding response. The WHO, an arm of the United Nations, is responsible for coordinating international action in a crisis like this, but it has suffered budget cuts, has lost many of its brightest minds and was slow to sound a global alarm on Ebola. Not until Aug. 8, 4 1 ⁄ 2 months into the epidemic, did the organization declare a global emergency. Its Africa office, which oversees the region, initially did not welcome a robust role by the CDC in the response to the outbreak.

"Previous Ebola outbreaks had been quickly throttled, but that experience proved misleading and officials did not grasp the potential scale of the disaster. Their imaginations were unequal to the virulence of the pathogen.

"In retrospect, we could have responded faster. Some of the criticism is appropriate," acknowledged Richard Brennan, director of the WHO's Department of Emergency Risk Management and Humanitarian Response. But he added, "While some of the criticism we accept, I think we also have to get things in perspective that this outbreak has a dynamic that's unlike everything we've ever seen before and, I think, has caught everyone unawares."

"The epidemic has exposed a disconnect between the aspirations of global health officials and the reality of infectious disease control..."

See Full Story

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/10/04/how-ebola-sped-out-of-control/?hpid=z1http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/10/04/how-ebola-sped-out-of-control/?hpid=z1