Ebola experience is a wake-up call for the WHO

NEW SCIENTIST  Opinion                                   May 6, 2015

...HOW the world has changed. In 1948, the first commercial jet airliner was still a few years away from take-off, and the global population was just over 2 billion. Less than one-third lived in cities. Back then, safeguarding global health seemed an eminently manageable project. The newly formed United Nations agreed, and established the World Health Organization.

 Now, over half the planet's 7 billion people are packed into urban areas. Between us, we travel tens of billions of kilometres around the globe every year, with plenty of pathogens and parasites coming along for the ride. The WHO, largely unchanged since its creation, is ill-equipped to deal with the disease threats that this new world creates.

The recent Ebola outbreak is a case in point. Even the WHO's director-general, Margaret Chan, said her organisation was "overwhelmed" and admitted that a crisis on that scale "cannot be solved by a single agency".

Those are chilling words. Shocking and scary as it is, the Ebola crisis has actually been relatively small: 26,000 cases across six countries. The prospect of something much bigger is very real (see "The next plague: How many mutations are we away from disaster?"). A variant of the influenza virus is the most likely immediate threat, but as the emergence of Ebola, SARS, MERS and others shows, there are plenty of other nasties waiting in the wings. As things stand, we are horribly exposed to the worst-case scenario.

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http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630203.000-ebola-experience-is-a-wakeup-call-for-the-who.html