The shocking video in today's The New York Times shows the reaction in Liberia to a man walking out of an Ebola clinic. If a picture is worth a thousand words, these two videos are worth a million words. The situation is dire and the lack of funding and human resources from and through the World Health Organization is now clearly failing to turn back this disaster.
Phone calls from victims go unanswered because the government system is too overwhelmed to pick them up or care for them. Even food and water is apparently scarce in the Ebola clinic and the pressure is mounting on those who are brave enough to be on the ground helping staff the Ebola clinics.
The World Health Organization is an international intergovernmental organization --nothing more than the sum of its parts --- and depends completely on its member nations to respond to calls for funding and help. Doctors Without Borders may be the riskiest profession in the world and to them we owe a tremendous amount of respect and gratitude, along with other organizations funding medical missionaries to these areas like Samaritan's Purse and others.
There is no governmental solution except in retrospect, it would have helped to have funded better infrastructure for public health surveillance and perhaps an epidemic could have been averted. Lawrence Gostin, law professor and friend, at Georgetown University School of Law, authored an article in today's Lancet that makes that argument and offers suggestions of setting up a fund for funding better infrastructure for prevention of biodisasters. Here's the article: Ebola: towards an International Health Systems Fund.
Meanwhile, the peak of the epidemic is still rising and I expect a rally at the World Health Organization in another call for assistance to its member states. But with multiple global disasters unfolding at the same time, it is going to be a challenge.
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