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The Ebola in your future.

By SCOTT GOTTLIED and TEVI TROY [from The Wall Street Journal] — The World Health Organization’s failed response to the Ebola crisis shows anew that the group is more a politically minded policy-making body than a relief agency. The WHO claims that it lacked the resources to respond to Ebola, but while the outbreak was spiraling out of control in West Africa, the organization had plenty of time and money to mount an international campaign to combat what it flagged last month as a “grave concern.” Not Ebola, but electronic cigarettes.

We need to create an off-the-shelf logistical enterprise capable of inserting public-health resources to snuff out contagious threats that have pandemic potential. Such a capability might reside with the United Nations, or better, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, so that when a deadly virus emerges in developing areas the U.S. and its allies can control its spread before it hits major population areas. We need to think about the same issue domestically as well. If the Ebola pandemic were to come to the U.S., it is unclear who would lead the response: The Department of Health and Human Services has the expertise, but the Defense Department and Homeland Security have the assets.

Ebola shows the danger of diseases developing and spreading around the world from a key convergence point. As Richard Preston wrote in his 1994 nonfiction best-seller “The Hot Zone,” when a novel virus emerges, the warning sign may be a series of small outbreaks at different times and places. These “microbreaks” can eventually re-emerge like Ebola has and become a pandemic. How many Ebola microbreaks were missed or not taken seriously? And how many other lethal pathogens—from MERS to SARS to Enterovirus 68—are we too casual about today?

The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general just issued a highly critical report finding that DHS lacks sufficient supplies and preparedness to handle a domestic pandemic. Thirteen years ago, soon after the 9/11 attacks, letters laced with anthrax killed five Americans. Just as 9/11 revealed the country’s vulnerabilities to terror attacks, the anthrax episode exposed the need for better routine surveillance and strategic stockpiling of key countermeasures against viral outbreaks or bioterror attacks. We’re still far less prepared than we should be, and far more vulnerable than we’re admitting.

 Continued at The Wall Street Journal [subscribers] | More Chronicle and Notices.
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