Is WHO Response to Ebola is Enough?
Okechukwu Nsofor
One of the most mind boggling footages to be
aired in recent times was that of CNN which showed the suffering of Ebola
patients in Liberia.
Ebola
is bad news, it is one of the most deadly and devastating diseases we have seen
in recent times which are capable of wiping out entire families and
communities. It has also become a devourer of sorts and is now the new money spender
for multilateral agencies such as WHO. The question we need to ask though is
that even with the new trend of expenditure has WHO done enough? Where is this
money going to and why haven’t they been able to solve the problem? How radical
has their approach been in light of the need for drastic measures to eradicate
the disease completely.
If
Nigeria, through sheer will and determination and concerted efforts to stamp
out Ebola, eliminated itwithin a short period of time, why can’t WHO help the
West African countries to do the same? These countries apart from the
devastation and pain they are going through now have to bear the stigma that
comes with Ebola. They are also not alone, West Africans and Africa as a whole
have been stigmatized. The problem, therefore, has far more reaching
consequences than health implications and as included discrimination and
stigmatization to it.
We
are sitting on a potential time bomb which has far reaching implications. It
looks like the Ebola issue has also become like one of those fashionable things
that WHO pushes through celebrities who assist them in raising funds for poor developing
countries. This strategy has been deployed for years, yet Africa is still very
poor. Will this approach work for the eradication of Ebola or does something
more drastic need to be done? It is a disease that must be treated radically,
must not be left to fester and must be stopped instantly. The world today is facing a more deadly
killer. We have once again apart from the issue of poverty and raging concerns
about sustained development recorded one of the most damning image in recent
times – it looks like it’s now become sexy for Africans to be looked upon as
the poor brother or sister of other countries who can’t do anything to help him
or herself.
Even when the disease is still restricted to
the poor countries of Guinea, Liberia, Sierra-Leone and Mali, the pandemic
remains a potential threat to a sizeable population of the human race. The
international community expects the organization to focus more on ways of
reining in the Ebola pandemic before it spreads tentacles to every part of the
globe.
At a
recent conference of parties on Tobacco, the media reports from Washington
Times widely circulated Ms Chan exasperation ‘when she was quoted as saying I can’t be a
single-issue director-general.”
Ms. Chan remarked. “I don’t want people to think I spend all of my time on
Ebola.” The issue requires a bit more sensitivity than the statement. While she
is not required to be a single-issue director, the attention given to Ebola at
this time must be one of strong determination and strong focus – it must be
drastic and not allowed to fester, it must not become a fad. She must work
furiously and fastidiously to eradicate Ebola from our midst.
The focus on
issues such as tobacco and the like when compared to the human destruction
caused by Ebola is a problem – because while people are dying in droves,
communities are on the verge of being wiped out they continue to focus on
issues which are not in need of as much attention as Ebola. The song we should
all be singing now is:‘Ebola must be wiped out completely and quickly before it
takes more lives than it already has’.
There is also a conspiracy theory that the virus was part of the western world’s
weaponisation programme, with WHO right in the middle. Conspiracy theorists
posit that this is in line with their experiments to develop germs for
biological warfare. The Ebola pandemic
began in late February in Guinea while United Nations agencies were said to be
conducting nationwide vaccine campaign for three other diseases in rural
districts. The simultaneous eruptions of the virus in widely separated zones
strongly suggested that the virulent Zaire Ebola strain (ZEBOV) was
deliberately introduced to test an antidote in secret trials on unsuspecting humans.
According
to the theories, the cross-border escape of Ebola into neighbouring Sierra
Leone and Liberia indicates that something went terribly wrong during clinical
trials by a major pharmaceutical company.
The intelligence community has stressed the strange coincidence of the
earliest Ebola outbreak in Guinea with the three major vaccine campaigns
conducted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UN children’s agency
UNICEF. At least two of the vaccination programmes were implemented by Medicins
Sans Frontieres (MSF)(Doctors Without Borders). The mystery at the heart of the
Ebola outbreak is how the 1995 Zaire (ZEBOV) strain, which originated in
Central Africa some 4,000 km away managed to suddenly resurface a decade later
in Guinea, West Africa.
Incidentally,
as no evidence of Ebola infections in transit has been detected at airports,
ports or highways, the initial infection may have come from the earlier
mentioned secret trials. Curiously, the
Guinea outbreak was not reported by the World Health Organisation (WHO) until
six weeks after the initial round of infections in February. That was quite odd
considering the armies of medical workers in the countryside during those
vaccine campaigns. By contrast, the MSF in next-door Senegal knew about the
Guinea Ebola contagion less than a month after outbreak. The outbreak in early
March coincided with three separate vaccination campaigns countrywide: a
cholera oral vaccine effort by Medicin Sans Frontieres under WHO; and
UNICEF-funded prevention programmes against meningitis and polio.
It would be proper to focus on the role of the
UNICEF executive director Anthony Lake. Lake was National Security Advisor to
President Bill Clinton and was responsible for US military intervention in
Yugoslavia, Somalia and Haiti. Incidentally, one of Lake’s closest
international allies during the Balkan war was Bernard Kouchner, the co-founder
of Medicins Sans Frontieres who was appointed Foreign Minister under President
Nicholas Sarkozy. The functional role of MSF is as a conveyor belt dumping
vaccines from major pharmaceutical companies onto low-income and poorly
educated populations of the developing world. The theorists also postulated
that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was likely linked to a dual use-use experiment,
for application in tropical health and as a biowarfare shield. Is it,
therefore, a co-incidence that the West
is now in a hurry to develop vaccines for the scourge because of the threats it
poses to their countries and population. We need to ask the question again, has
WHO done enough? The statement by Ms Chan clearly shows that issues such as
Tobacco and the like which cannot in anyway be compared to the immediate
devastation that Ebola has brought upon famililies, communities and the world
may have been put on the same pedestal as Ebola. May God help us in West
Africa. While we need to acknowledge the help of organisations like WHO, its
time for Africans to really rise up and help themselves – whether the problem
is one of tobacco or Ebola or Malaria or hunger and poverty – we must not be
made into money spinning ventures which benefit a few but the people for which
it is meant for. The help really must be found within ourselves and within the
continent itself.
0 comments: