WHO launches $100m emergency fund

GENEVA: The World Health Organization is setting up a $100 million contingency fund to ensure that the UN agency will not be “overwhelmed” by a major crisis again as it was with Ebola.
The WHO and director-general Margaret Chan have come under fire for their slow response to West Africa’s Ebola epidemic, which began in Guinea in December 2013 but was not declared an international public health emergency until August 2014.
“I do not ever again want to see this organization faced with a situation it is not prepared, staffed, funded, or administratively set up to manage,” Chan told health ministers on Monday at the start of the WHO’s annual nine-day assembly.
“I plan to complete these changes by the end of the year.”
Chan, a former health director of Hong Kong at the helm of the WHO since Jan. 2007, said that WHO had been “overwhelmed” by the Ebola epidemic that has killed more than 11,000 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Asked later by a reporter whether she had considered resigning or had been asked to, she replied: “The answer is no. Nobody ever asked me. The buck stops with me. As a responsible leader you need to learn lessons and make the right changes.”
Earlier, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the WHO’s 194 member states that the organization must streamline management to respond quickly to crises like the “Ebola catastrophe.”
“We ought to have reacted far earlier,” she said.