The outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa appears more out of control than ever. By Friday, the virus had infected more than 2,000 people in four countries and had killed more than half of them. The World Health Organization, which snoozed on the sidelines for months after the outbreak was first identified in March, has issued increasingly frantic warnings in recent days. On Aug. 8, it declared the spread of the virus “a public health emergency of international concern.” On Thursday, it warned that the reported numbers of people killed or sickened by the virus may “vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak” because many sick people escape detection. The next day, it said that patients flooding into newly opened treatment centers were filling beds faster than they could be provided.

The current cases, like other Ebola outbreaks in past decades, are a regional problem that must be fought primarily by local African governments, which understand the cultural practices that foster the spread of the virus and inhibit patients from seeking help. This outbreak poses little or no danger to the United States or Europe. Unfortunately, the three countries most affected — Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — are among the poorest and most war-racked in the world and have very weak health care systems. They desperately need help in organizing their responses.

The W.H.O. should be filling that role, but it has been shamefully slow. Its regional office for Africa, which should have acted first, is ineffective, politicized, and poorly managed, with staff members who are often incompetent, according to international health experts familiar with its operations. The central office of the W.H.O. in Geneva has belatedly tried to pick up the slack but is hampered by large self-imposed budget cuts, accompanied by a loss of talented professionals in its programs to control such outbreaks. These shortsighted cuts will need to be restored, perhaps by sacrificing less important items, to ensure that the next time there is an Ebola outbreak the agency can jump into action. The World Bank has said it plans to contribute up to $200 million to the fight.

There is still no drug or vaccine that has been proved safe and effective in human clinical trials, but progress is being made in pushing promising candidates forward. Two Ebola vaccines could begin initial safety testing in people as early as next month, and a drug has been judged safe enough to test in humans who are already infected. Even if these or other medicines prove effective, which is by no means a certainty, no one expects them to curb this outbreak. The goal is to find weapons to use when the next epidemic breaks out.