THE ebola crisis should be a "wake-up" call for the world to become more prepared to deal with outbreaks of deadly disease, a leading public health expert has warned.
Professor Lawrence Gostin, director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, Washington DC, said it was only a matter of luck that there had not been more cases of the deadly virus occurring outside of West Africa.
Gostin - who is also the director of the World Health Organisation's Collaborating Centre on Public Health Law & Human Rights, also based in the United States - will be speaking at Edinburgh University tomorrow as part of a series of free public events examining the ebola crisis.
He is calling for the establishment of an international fund to respond to future health crises and improve healthcare in poorer countries in the long term, as well as arguing for a "reserve" of global health workers to be created to deal with emergencies.
Gostin said: "If you had a contingency fund and a health reserve workforce, I do believe we would have snuffed this outbreak out early on instead of facing a catastrophic humanitarian crisis that, if we are not lucky, could envelop the world.
"We also need to think in the long term, and a health systems fund would be like an insurance policy to build health systems uniformly across the world.
"When the next big health crisis hits, that country itself would be able to deal with it and at the same time provide effective, everyday care that we expect in Scotland or the US, for example, but somehow we just don't think of as a priority in other poor regions of the world.
"If we did those three things, we would make huge advances in global health."
He added: "So far we have been lucky - but if we are unlucky what will happen is the virus will jump to another highly congested poor city, and if that happens it will come back to haunt the developed world as we would see more and more cases arising on our shores. It is a possible scenario.
"It is a very sad thing that we need luck now, as we shouldn't have to rely on luck - but that is what we are doing now."
Earlier this month, it was reported that a leaked internal report from the WHO - the public health agency of the United Nations - revealed its botched attempts to contain the ebola outbreak.
Gostin added: "I think that ebola has to be a turning point for the World Health Organisation, which has been really sidelined in this epidemic.
"It has virtually no funding and it only has control over one-third of its already inadequate budget. This needs to be a wake-up call for the WHO itself."
Dr Devi Sridhar, a senior lecturer in global public health at Edinburgh University, said: "There are very important lessons in terms of making sure we have the institutional infrastructure in place to make sure we can respond to these kinds of crises and so we are not trying to scramble around and pick up the pieces.
"For these kinds of things we do need to have global co-operation. It is not only for humanitarian reasons and human rights reasons - helping and supporting countries - but also making sure we protect the world's population as a whole."
Meanwhile, efforts are being stepped up to tackle ebola in the countries which have been worst affected by the virus.
International development and aid organisation Mercy Corps, which has its European headquarters in Edinburgh, is launching a public health education campaign in Liberia.
The group will use community volunteers and text messaging to try to reach two million people in the country - around half the population.
The advice will include messages covering what the symptoms are of ebola and what to do if someone is suspected of having contracted the disease.
Simon O'Connell, Mercy Corps' West Africa programme director, said efforts would also be focused on trying to respond to the economic needs of the country. Liberia was just beginning to recover from 14 years of civil war when the ebola outbreak hit.
O'Connell added: "We take a holistic approach to these crises, which is focused on not looking at just the immediate short-term priorities - which are absolutely essential for prevention and containment - but also the long-term impact.
"We are currently projecting that around 1.3 million people will need emergency food assistance in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia in the first quarter of next year, but as this outbreak continues, that figure may become two to three times higher in the coming months."
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