World Health Organisation Battles Climate And Sugar, Misses Ebola

While they fight global warming and sugar scares, virus-based diseases ignored

Countless bazillions have been spent over decades by the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the World Bank to save the world from climate change, tobacco, sugar, fast foods and poverty, but when a real-life health crisis lands the great global collective of do-gooding bureaucracies has failed miserably. The World Health Organization, mostly silent on Ebola until six months ago, has now plastered its Web side with Ebola wallpaper. The UN and World Bank are also now rushing to cover their positions despite their obvious inability to respond to the crisis.

If the WHO is good at anything, it’s distributing advocacy wordage by the tonne, the kind of stuff nobody can eat or use to save a life. On August 28, months after the initial Ebola outbreak, the WHO produced an “Ebola Response Roadmap,” a 20-page document filled with bureaucratic wheeze. The WHO would, for example, “assist in delineating existing response needs and encourage partners to provide the needed resources to meet such needs.”

Last week the WHO produced another report on what countries not yet hit with Ebola should do. Sample:

Building on national and international existing preparedness efforts, a set of tools is being developed to help any country to intensify and accelerate their readiness. One of these tools is a comprehensive checklist of core principles, standards, capacities and practices, which all countries should have or meet. The checklist can be used by countries to assess their level of preparedness, guide their efforts to strengthen themselves and to request assistance. Items on the checklist include infection prevention control, contact tracing, case management, surveillance, laboratory capacity, safe burial, public awareness and community engagement and national legislation and regulation to support country readiness.

Thousands could die before any of this (whatever it is) happens. At a news conference Tuesday, a WHO official announced that West Africa will be enduring 5,000 to 10,000 new cases of Ebola every week by the end of next month. But it seems a little late for the WHO — with an annual budget of $4-billion — to be sounding alarms on a crisis that should have been right at the top of its response list six months ago.

Maybe the WHO is too busy. It’s web site is loaded with reports on long-range global warming risks, deadly sugar warnings and other initiatives. On Tuesday, as the Ebola crisis grew, the WHO’s global tobacco control convention met in Moscow. Meetings were to be public, but the sessions attended by 170 countries were closed on Monday and the media removed and press conferences cancelled. One news report said the convention, officially known as the Conference of the Parties (COP6) to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control , secretly approved a global tobacco tax that would double and triple the price of cigarettes. What’s next — a tax on sugar, one of the WHO’s preoccupations?

As with carbon, tobacco control plan is to have a tobacco-free world by 2040 — or some such date.

Charges that the WHO bungled Ebola have come from many sources, including World Bank President Dr. Jim Yong Kim.The New York Times reported Monday that Mr. Kim, at a public meeting, took a shot at Dr. Margaret Chan, head of the WHO. According to the Times, Mr. Kim addressed Ms. Chan directly at a meeting at World Bank headquarters last month: “You have the authority to act in this emergency, he told her, according to people familiar with the meeting, ‘so why aren’t you doing it?’”

Ms. Chan responded: “I am also frustrated.”

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