Laurie Garrett Says WHO's Priorities Are "Nuts"

“[T]he WHO is so reliant” on “wealthy-donor money,” writes Laurie Garrett, “its mission is swayed — in too many directions — by those countries’ agendas, ideologies and pet projects.”

In a world of globalized health threats, this is nuts. The WHO has to be able to put its resources where experts can show they are most needed.

The always out-spoken Garrett complains that all the buzz at last week’s 58th annual World Health Assembly in Geneva was about Bill Gates’ announcement to an “awestruck” crowd that his foundation would up research into “breakthrough” medicine from $200 million a year to $450 million and “would up its support for the search for an AIDS vaccine by $400 million.”

“In contrast to the agile, focused — but unaccountable — Gates Foundation, the WHO is governed by its often-embattled member states and lumbers along at a snail’s pace, burdened by an obvious lack of clarity about its mission,” says Garrett in her op-ed, “Speed up snail-like WHO.” More below:
Garrett says the problem isn’t money itself:

The problem isn’t money, although more would help. The core budget of the WHO is just $400 million, but it doesn’t operate on that sum alone. More than 70 percent of its budget comes from wealthy-nation donors supporting specific programs, which brings real spending to about $1.5 billion a year.

Published in the Los Angeles Times, and reprinted at The Charlotte Observer (free subscriptions), Garrett goes further:

Last week alone there were 16 disease outbreaks in 13 countries, including deadly Ebola and Marburg viruses, polio, meningitis and, most ominous of all, avian flu. Yet right now, the entire global alert and response operation for epidemics at the WHO is — brace yourself — five people, out of roughly 6,000 employees.

The Gates Foundation isn’t going to send scientists into Marburg outbreaks or lead a global response to pandemic flu. That’s the WHO’s job.

The WHO should establish a smart, mobile global health force, based in Geneva, that can respond to crises around the world. Wealthy nations should be urged — shamed — into funding it, for their own survival.

And instead of beefing up mini-WHO bureaucracies around the world, the agency should fix public health systems in poor countries — training personnel, funding labs and communication systems so that local health-care workers can respond to new disease outbreaks.

Emphases mine.