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| Campaign for funds to tackle outbreaks of infectious killer diseases |
Global health leaders will ask G7 leaders this weekend to
back the creation of a specialist rapid response unit to tackle outbreaks of
infectious killer diseases.
The move reflects how the
World Health Organization in particular was caught unprepared last year by
Ebola, which spread through three West African countries, has killed 11,000
people, and will not be stamped out before the end of this year.
Reuters report continues:
Jeremy Farrar, director
of the Wellcome Trust global health charity, said the unit should come under
the WHO, but be free of bureaucracy and able to act independently "in
days" when a potentially fatal epidemic begins.
"With Ebola, it's
taken too long. It's nonsense to say: 'Isn't it great? We've done in a year
what normally takes four or five years'. We got to get into a mindset that says
these infectious diseases can emerge in days and weeks, so we need to respond
to that, not to some fanciful notion of an ideal world."
Farrar said German
Chancellor Angela Merkel appeared supportive of the proposal when he and other
global health specialists met her last month to discuss international reforms
ahead of the summit of the Group of Seven world powers that she is hosting on
June 7-8.
The specialists,
including Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine and a co-discoverer of the Ebola virus, foresee a rapid response unit
of around 100 people working within the WHO in Geneva, able to call on a
reserve of up to 10,000 scientists worldwide as necessary.
The reservists would
include experts in infectious diseases, virologists and epidemiologists with a
mandate to travel quickly to the source of an outbreak.
"We mustn't think
surveillance itself is enough. The world is already much better at detecting these
things as they emerge. But what we need is the capacity to respond,"
Farrar said.
The rapid response
operation could cost US$100-200 million a year, but Farrar said this paled
beside the hundreds of millions being spent on fighting Ebola, and regional economic
losses that the World Bank has estimated at around $500 million.
Experts say future
epidemics are inevitable, as new and unknown viruses jump from animals to
humans and mutate in ways that could one day make them a pandemic threat.
Even if the time and
place cannot be predicted, Farrar said the world could still prepare.
"There are only
certain parts of a human body that can be affected: there can be respiratory
infections like SARS and MERS, or blood-borne things like Ebola, there are
sexually transmitted things like HIV. But there isn't an unlimited number, and
it is possible to prepare for and respond to them."
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