The World Health Organisation (WHO) has announced it will create a contingency fund and an emergency workforce to respond quickly to crises after strong criticism of the agency's delay in confronting the Ebola epidemic.
Reuters Health quotes director-general Dr Margaret Chan as saying at an emergency meeting called to discuss the agency's Ebola response that the outbreak showed the need to strengthen WHO's crisis management and to streamline procedures for recruiting frontline workers.
Ebola has been "a mega crisis and it overwhelmed the capacity of WHO", she said. "Member states truly understand that the world does need a collective defence mechanism for global health security."
A resolution seeking major reforms, brought by the US and South Africa, was adopted by consensus at the meeting of the 34-member executive board. "The WHO we have is not the WHO we need, not the WHO we needed to respond to health emergencies of the magnitude of Ebola," Tom Frieden, director of the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC), said.
Major donors welcomed agreement on the emergency fund, which a WHO committee had recommended in 2011 should contain $100m after the 2009-2010 influenza pandemic. Chan told reporters that the figure was "a good starting point". Bruce Aylward, WHO assistant director-general in charge of the Ebola response, said the agency would need about a workforce of about 1,500 for such emergencies, up from 1,000 currently.
[link url="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/25/us-health-ebola-who-idUSKBN0KY0KA20150125"]Full Reuters Health report[/link]