The World Health Organization’s failure to sound the alarm until months into West Africa’s Ebola outbreak was an “egregious failure” which added to the enormous suffering and death toll, global health experts said on Monday. A specialist panel convened by Harvard’s Global Health Institute (HGHI) said while the epidemic “engendered acts of outstanding courage and solidarity,” it also caused “immense human suffering, fear and chaos” which went “largely unchecked” by leadership or reliable and rapid institutional responses. Reviewing the global response to the epidemic which swept through Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the panel said such failures should not be allowed to happen again, and major reform is urgently needed to prevent future pandemics, Reuters reported.
