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.

As the Ebola outbreak turned into a crisis, the WHO’s regional headquarters in Africa attempted to convey the seriousness of the problem to the central body of the WHO, but those messages either didn’t reach the appropriate organizational leaders or these leaders didn’t realize their importance. Early warnings about the outbreak, including some from Doctors without Borders, didn’t result in an adequate response. As one humanitarian organization leader who was working on the ground said, “We didn’t really pay attention to the Ebola outbreak at first, because the numbers were so small....”

Read complete article.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/07/ebola-created-a-public-health-emergency-and-we-werent-ready-for-it/

Read complete WHO report

http://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/ebola/ebola-panel-report/en/