The United Nations bungled detection of the Ebola crisis and an agency should be created to deal with monitoring world health crises in the future, says Brian Hook, former U.S. assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs.
"March is when this Ebola virus first emerged," Hook said in a recent interview on the "Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"It was in the southeastern forest region of Guinea and there were about 50 people in that region who were complaining of hemorrhagic fever. On March 22, the government confirmed that these were Ebola cases."
But the first responder was not the World Health Organization, the UN's public health arm, but rather the humanitarian medical charity Doctors Without Borders.
"That is your opportunity to contain an epidemic and … the World Health Organization did not declare an international health emergency until August and this is the kind of sort of bungled response that we can't possibly allow," said Hook, a founding partner of Latitude Telcom Consultants.
"I suggest we remove the detection capability outside of the U.N. entirely … The World Health Organization is largely a union of health ministers. And government sometimes either through incompetence or just trying to hide the evidence can be one of these kinds of obstacles you have to deal with."
"If you were to house the detection capability outside of the UN you wouldn't experience that conflict of interest the WHO sometimes feels when they need to expose and embarrass a government for its slow response."
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