(Newswire.net — March 21, 2015) Geneva, EU — The World Health Organization (WHO) delayed declaring a public health emergency amid the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia because it was worried it could affect local economies or interfere with a Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, a report by AP has revealed.
Health experts spoke of the seriousness of the crisis as soon as it occurred. By early June of last year, foreign workers were being evacuated. However, WHO didn’t declare the emergency until August 4, 2014, when the organization posted on its webpage “This is currently the largest EVD outbreak ever recorded.” The death toll had already reached 1,000 at that point.
According to the report, Dr Sylvie Briand, head of the pandemic and epidemic diseases department at WHO, admitted to AP that the organization made wrong decisions. She added, that WHO officials postponed the decision because it could have had economic consequences.
“What I’ve seen in general is that for developing countries it’s sort of a death warrant you’re signing,” she said.
Top expert on Ebola, Pierre Formenty, who was dispatched by WHO to Guinea to deal with the crisis, told AP that the West African government wanted to keep it down about the Ebola outbreak because it would effect the Bauxite export, the country’s main source of foreign currency.
Formenty shifted the blame to the Guinea officials saying they were looking to, “minimize artificially the magnitude of the Ebola outbreak to reassure expatriates working in the mining industry.”
An infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota, Michael Osterholm, commented on the WHO decision, that it is “like saying you don’t want to call the fire department because you’re afraid the fire trucks will create a disturbance in the neighborhood,” Russia Today reported.
“People died because things were not done,” said one former WHO employee, Matthieu Kamwa. He had previously worked as the WHO representative to the Democratic Republic of Congo when Ebola broke out in 2008.
As soon as WHO proclaimed the Ebola outbreak crisis in Western Africa, the whole world united to help and contain the disease. According to the WHO critics, that should have happened the moment the outbreak occurred, not a two months later.
Defending his body’s decision to delay calling an outbreak, Dr Bruce Aylward, said “What you would expect is the whole world wakes up and goes, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a terrible problem, we have to deploy additional people and send money.'” However, in reality “people thought, ‘Oh my goodness, there’s something really dangerous happening there and we need to restrict travel and the movement of people.'”