By Tom Miles
The World Health Organization is creating a "blueprint"
to improve the medical response to major outbreaks of diseases, after it was
accused of reacting too slowly to West Africa's Ebola epidemic, it said on
Friday.
"The goal
is to reduce the time from recognition of an outbreak to the availability of
new medical tools to four months or less," WHO Director-General Margaret
Chan told a news conference in Geneva.
"Doing so, I believe, will leave the world
better prepared for the next inevitable medical emergency. No one wants to see
clinicians, doctors, left empty handed again."
The plan is likely to cover influenza
strains such as H5N1 and could help prepare for a worsening spread of Middle
East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), among other diseases, WHO officials said.
The proposal is part of a swathe of reforms
designed to avoid a repetition of the U.N. health agency's slow response to the
Ebola epidemic, which has killed 11,294 people and has yet to be fully snuffed
out in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
The WHO is hoping to learn from the
development of an Ebola vaccine, which has proceeded at lightning speed
compared to normal drug development but only really took off once the Ebola
outbreak was already at crisis point.
One potential Ebola vaccine has been shown
to be 100 percent effective, trial data showed on Friday.
When the next epidemic comes, the WHO
wants the tools to tackle it much more quickly. It plans to analyse
diagnostics, vaccines, drugs and other medical equipment, and wants to take
research far enough so that the products could reach the final phase of efficacy
testing within four months of an outbreak.
"Based on our experience of Ebola and
our earlier experience of pandemic influenza, in some diseases it's very
difficult to develop innovations, especially from scratch, in four
months," Chan said.
WHO Assistant-Director-General Marie-Paule
Kieny said: "What we have started to work on ... is to see what should be
done for other diseases of epidemic potential, prior to any epidemic
starting."
The plan will set up "step-by-step
procedures, protocols, collaborative agreements, codes of conduct, and ideal
product profiles that can be put in place in advance," Chan said.
The blueprint is expected to be presented
to the WHO's annual conference of health ministers, the World Health Assembly,
in 2016, Kieny said.
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