WHO says Ebola is 'most severe acute health emergency in modern times'

[mystery-ak]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/ebola/11158504/WHO-says-Ebola-is-most-severe-acute-health-emergency-in-modern-times.html

WHO says Ebola is 'most severe acute health emergency in modern times'
The World Health Organisation issues stark warning as the Government is set to announce "important changes" in the NHS to tackle a possible outbreak



By Leon Watson

11:35AM BST 13 Oct 2014

The Ebola outbreak is the "most severe acute health emergency in modern times", the World Health Organisation has warned.

The agency's director-general Margaret Chan said the epidemic had proved "the world is ill-prepared to respond to any severe, sustained, and threatening public health emergency".

She added that new cases of Ebola are now "rising exponentially" in the three hardest-hit countries, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

In a statement to a regional health conference in the Philippine capital Manila, she said: "I have never seen a health event threaten the very survival of societies and governments in already very poor countries.

"I have never seen an infectious disease contribute so strongly to potential state failure."

continued...

[Scottftlc]

The state failure comes from ineffective and incompetent governments, unwilling to take the obvious actions necessary to deal with the disease...these governments, including our own, fight to maintain business as usual and a distracted population for political self-preservation, when that is the worst possible response to this kind of threat.