Experts are raising alarms about the world’s dwindling ability to handle infectious disease outbreaks. This concern comes as health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda are working urgently to manage an Ebola outbreak.
A report released on Monday by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) highlighted that as infectious disease outbreaks become more frequent, their impact is also increasing. The report cautioned that the threat of pandemics is advancing faster than efforts to prepare, suggesting that the world has not significantly improved in terms of safety.
The report further indicated that the likelihood of disease outbreaks is rising due to the climate crisis and armed conflicts. At the same time, global efforts are being hampered by geopolitical divisions and commercial interests.
The GPMB, a team of specialists formed in 2018 by the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), was established following the major Ebola outbreak in West Africa and just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. These recent insights are released as global attention focuses on a hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship, and soon after an international public health emergency was declared following at least 87 Ebola-related deaths in the DRC.
“These outbreaks are merely the latest challenges facing our world,” remarked WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus during the opening of the UN agency’s World Health Assembly in Geneva.
Anne Ancia, WHO’s representative in the DRC, informed Reuters that in the effort to combat the Ebola outbreak, their reserves of protective gear in Kinshasa have been depleted. A cargo plane is being readied to transport additional supplies from a storage facility in Kenya. Meanwhile, aid organizations like the International Rescue Committee and Médecins Sans Frontières have dispatched teams to assist with the outbreak response.
The WHO will host an urgent scientific consultation on Friday, bringing together top experts to collate what is known about the virus and where research and development of vaccines, tests and medicines should be focused.
In Geneva, Prof Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Georgetown University Center for Global Health Policy & Politics, said aid cuts may have played a role in leaving the world “playing catch-up against a very dangerous pathogen”.
He said: “Because early tests looked for the wrong strain of Ebola, we got false negatives and lost weeks of response time. By the time the alarm was raised, the virus had already moved along major transport routes and crossed borders.
“This crisis didn’t happen in a vacuum. When you pull billions out of the WHO and dismantle frontline USAID programmes, you gut the exact surveillance system meant to catch these viruses early. We are seeing the direct, deadly consequences of treating global health security as an optional expense.”
The GPMB report finds that new technologies, including novel vaccine platforms such as mRNA, have “advanced at unprecedented speed” and billions of dollars have been invested in pandemic preparedness and response.
But the world is “moving backwards” on measures such as ensuring equitable access to vaccines, tests and treatments, it found. During recent mpox outbreaks, vaccines took almost two years to reach affected countries in Africa, which is even slower than the 17 months it took for Covid-19 vaccines to be distributed.
Outbreaks had damaged trust in government, civil liberties and democratic norms, amplified by politicised responses and attacks on scientific institutions, the GPMB warned. These had outlasted the crises themselves and left societies “less resilient to the next emergency”, it said.
Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, GPMB co-chair and former president of Croatia, said: “The world does not lack solutions. But without trust and equity, those solutions will not reach the people who need them most.
“Political leaders, industry and civil society can still change the trajectory of global preparedness – if they turn their commitments into measurable progress before the next crisis strikes,” she said.
Countries failed to meet a deadline to finalise the pandemic agreement treaty before this week’s World Health Assembly in Geneva, after disagreements over guarantees of access to medical tests, vaccines and treatments in exchange for sharing information on any pathogens emerging on their territories.
The GPMB called on political leaders to establish a permanent, independent monitoring mechanism to track pandemic risk, conclude the pandemic agreement to ensure equitable access to vaccines, diagnostic tests and medicines, and put in place financing to secure preparedness and immediate responses to outbreaks.
Joy Phumaphi, the GPMB co-chair and a former health minister in Botswana, said: “If trust and cooperation continue to fracture, every country will be more exposed when the next pandemic strikes.”
