Biosecurity

Ebola is all but over, but the postmortem is just getting started

A year after the peak of the Ebola epidemic, which killed more than 11,300 people and threw the US and Europe into a panic, it is the global health system that is under scrutiny. In particular, the World Health Organisation (WHO) is in the dock for failing to act soon enough. Big questions are being asked about its competence and its future.

The WHO, founded in 1948 in a postwar world that understood the ravages of disease, pledged to work for “the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health”. Its most celebrated success was the eradication of smallpox in the 1970s. Infectious diseases have been the priority for most of its history. A huge collaborative effort against polio has rid all but two countries of the endemic disease and record numbers of children around the globe are vaccinated against common killers such as diphtheria and rotavirus.