Underfunded and Underprepared

Ebola was first identified in 1976, after an outbreak in present-day South Sudan killed 150 people. In the years since, outbreaks of the disease have flared every few years, ravaging entire villages before quarantines successfully contained the virus. But the current outbreak has been different—over 4,000 people have been killed in the largest Ebola outbreak in history, and at least 17 cases of Ebola have been treated outside of West Africa.

The unprecedented pace of the disease could have been halted much earlier had the international community’s response not been so slow until now.

Patient zero is believed to be a two-year-old boy who died in Guinea on December 6, 2013. It wasn’t until three months later in March 2014, that the World Health Organization, which has suffered from drastic budget cuts and staff layoffs, announced a major Ebola outbreak in Guinea. Even if public health officials were slow to diagnose the outbreak, little could have been done without the support of the international community in providing medical equipment, doctors, and expertise.

So little was being done even by September that President Obama bluntly stated, “We are not moving fast enough. We are not doing enough,” at a United Nations meeting last month.

Now that two American health workers in Dallas, Texas, have contracted the disease from a Liberian patient, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working frantically to keep Ebola from spreading. The president cancelled a trip to convene a cabinet meeting to discuss the deadly virus and the public’s increasing fears.

Of course, the disease must be treated seriously, but the sudden rush to screen, quarantine, and develop experimental treatments ought to prompt reflection and reform of the sorry state of public health funding that brought the world to the brink.

Rushing experimental treatments only when a public health crisis threatens the Western world is not a viable state of affairs—research funding, which has been heavily hit by Congress’s sequestration, ought to develop cures and treatments for all diseases, whether they affect Africans or Americans.

As America spends nearly $500 million to train and arm Syrian rebels, public health initiatives, like American funding to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, are receiving less and less. The WHO has been hobbled by cuts, and received more in 2013 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation than from any single country.

If there is any area in world affairs that requires American leadership, it is in fighting and preventing disease. International apathy to all but major epidemics simply won’t do.