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DRC Ebola Outbreak 2019 Blog 11 WHO’s Limited Resources Increase Ebola virus Pandemic Likelihood
The WHO is an arm of the United Nations whose mission includes disseminating health information to its member states and international partners. Another part of this mission is to support and enhance developing countries’ health care systems and global public health. These activities help all sectors of societies while increasing global trade and decreasing global conflicts. Stable governments and public health infrastructures are also core building blocks for rapid detection and termination of EID outbreaks found mostly along the equatorial belt.
One of the WHO’s programs for promoting global health is through using the One Health model, which integrates the health of humans with that of animals, plants and ecosystems. Some EID epidemics emerge from humans contracting infectious diseases from wild animals, mosquitoes or other environmental reservoirs. In understanding the interconnected web of humans, animals and the environment, One Health as a global policy initiative attempts to minimize those human activities that damage ecosystems, thus decreasing EID exposures and zoonotic outbreaks (1, 64-65).
The WHO and other international organizations that focus on global health issues receive funding through public and private institutions and sovereign states. The more economically and politically stable sovereign states fund most of the WHO budget. The pact between international institutions focusing on public health and sovereign nation-states is that in exchange for funding these institutions, the WHO and other institutions improve global public health and promote the exchange of health information.
In 2019, the WHO call for resources to fight this Ebola outbreak and the new EID threats has gone unanswered for over 11 months. The pact between the WHO and developed nations for funding many health and humanitarian projects is now under threat and must be revived in time for the great infectious disease wars that are already here (3-5). Experts request that the United Nations, World Health Organization and the World Bank to use their economic and political clout to motivate nations to act in their own interests and that of humanity, against the new EIDs threats and their pandemics (66-69).
In weighing the dangers to humanity, EID pandemics are far more deadly than traditional wars (Discussion section). Therefore, it is useful to compare the annual military budgets of G20 governments to the WHO’s general budget. Cooperative funding, resource use and training for global biosecurity should meet and exceed the ongoing threat of pandemics. Importantly, the G20 nations do contribute well over their mandated fees as members of the WHO while also funding their own national and global humanitarian projects.
Total donations to the WHO are about US 4.4 billion dollars every 2 years, which is minute relative to the total annual budgets of larger nations (70-71). The WHO is not a perfectly run organization. Combining the sum of donations of the wealthiest nations, with strict oversight, the WHO could receive many times their biannual budget to strengthen general global health. Developed nations usually help fund a separate set of programs for the WHO and its affiliates dedicated to EID surveillance and response.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies, based in London, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s ranked the nations that spend the most money on their annual military budgets. Each spends about 2–3% of their nation’s gross domestic product on military items. The smallest of these top 15 nations spent 35 billion dollars, while the largest 3 nations combined spend about 900 billion on their annual military budgets. The total annual military budget of these top fifteen countries is 1.7 trillion dollars (72-73). The WHO’s yearly budget is about one-thousandth of the sum of the combined annual military budgets of these nations.
As previously discussed, to fight the world’s most lethal outbreaks, the WHO was not given the 100 million dollars in emergency funding, one-hundredth of 10 billion dollars, or less than one ten-thousandth of the annual 1.7 trillion dollars total spent by the top 15 countries’ military budgets. Months after the original request, this emergency discretionary budget will require significantly increased funding to address the DRC Ebola outbreak, according to the most recent WHO Strategic Response Plan details (Discussion section). Importantly, the WHO is also fighting concurrent EID outbreaks with lethal pandemic potential occurring in other parts of the world.
Dr. Tom Frieden, former Director of the CDC, gave an example where international funding for health care infrastructures has already spared the world from a pandemic. During the 2014 West African Ebola virus epidemic, an infected patient flew into Lagos, Nigeria and was identified as having Ebola virus disease and isolated. This patient infected others on the clinical team who were treating him. The Ebola virus spread in Lagos. An internationally funded polio vaccination center in Lagos had managers with expertise in outbreak control who were rerouted to help stop this Ebola outbreak. According to Dr. Tom Frieden, without the Lagos polio vaccine center and its skillful, well-trained staff on hand for this new threat, this Ebola outbreak would have escaped deep into Lagos, a city of 21 million residents and using the Lagos regional transportation hubs and international airport escaped to the outer world (41, 74).
Copyright © 2019 Na’eem A. Abdullah All Rights Reserved
Morning fog on the African river Sangha. Congo. Sergey Uryadnikov Photographer/ Shutterstock Photos.
Many emerging infectious diseases originate in tropical ecosystems. See About Page - Sangha River.
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