What is the global health emergency? The World Health Organization announced on July 17 local time in Geneva that the Ebola outbreak in Congo was a global health emergency. Since August last year, the epidemic has infected more than 2500 people, including more than 1600 deaths. The world health organization hopes that the epidemic will receive wider attention from the international community and raise the necessary funds.
Since August 2018, the outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has killed more than 1600 people, the second fatal Ebola epidemic in history. The escalation of the epidemic by who into a global health emergency will often attract more international attention and assistance, but people are also worried that the highly nervous government may overreact and block the border.
After the statement, World Health Organization President Pedros said that although the risk of virus transmission in the region is still high, the risk of virus outward diffusion is very low. Tederos insisted that the statement was issued to attract more international attention, not to raise more funds - although the WHO estimates that 'hundreds of millions of dollars' are needed to end the epidemic.
Dr. Liu, President of doctors without borders, said she hoped that after the epidemic was characterized as a global health emergency, she could promote a new Ebola epidemic response plan. She said: "we have been fighting the epidemic for a year, but it has not been effectively controlled. What we are doing is far from enough." If we don't make any changes, there will be no better results. " She said that at present, the scope of vaccination should be expanded and more efforts should be made to build trust.
The World Health Organization defines' global emergency health events' as' special events' that pose a threat to other countries and require a coordinated response from the international community. This is the fifth time in history that a global health emergency has been issued. The first four were: the Ebola outbreak in West Africa from 2014 to 2016, which killed more than 11000 people at that time; The emergence of Zika virus in America; The swine flu epidemic and the resurgence of polio in Africa in 2014.
The World Health Organization has been severely criticized for its slow response to the epidemic in West Africa. It was not until the full outbreak of the virus in three countries killed nearly 1000 people that the epidemic was declared a global health emergency. Later, according to internal documents, the World Health Organization's move was because it was worried that once a global health emergency was announced, it would stimulate epidemic countries and seriously damage their economies.
The WHO emergency committee will meet again in the next three months to assess the epidemic.
Who rarely issues similar emergency statements. It only targets outbreaks that pose a serious threat to public health and may spread to other countries. The epidemic situations targeted by the past four similar statements include: influenza A (H1N1) in 2009; Transmission of polio in 2014; Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014; And the Zika virus epidemic in 2016.