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Source: http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/articl.../API/308049729
UN bungles response to Africa's yellow fever outbreak
Published: Thursday, August 4, 2016 at 2:45 p.m. Last Modified: Thursday, August 4, 2016 at 2:45 p.m.
KINSHASA, Congo (AP) ? The World Health Organization and its partners shipped more than 6 million yellow fever vaccines to Angola in February to quash an emerging epidemic, yet when they asked country officials the following month what happened to the vaccines, they discovered that about 1 million doses had mysteriously disappeared.
Of the shipments that did make it to Angola, some vaccines were sent to regions with no yellow fever cases, while others arrived at infected areas without syringes. In neighboring Congo, some vaccines weren't always kept cold enough to guarantee they would be effective.
This lack of oversight and mismanagement has undermined control of the outbreak in Central Africa, the worst yellow fever epidemic in decades, an Associated Press investigation has found.
There is now a shortage of vaccines so severe that WHO has recommended doses be diluted by 80 percent to stretch the supply, even though there is limited evidence they will be effective in African populations.
"WE HAVE A MAJOR PROBLEM ON OUR HANDS," UNICEF's Robert Kezaala wrote in capital letters in a June email to his colleagues at WHO, Doctors Without Borders and other partners.
WHO vowed after its fumbled response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa that it would adopt a "no regrets" policy to better manage future disease outbreaks with its partners in other health organizations and national governments. But according to hundreds of pages of internal emails and documents obtained by AP, the U.N. health agency is facing many of the same problems that compromised its handling of Ebola, an outbreak that killed 11,000 people in three West African countries...
UN bungles response to Africa's yellow fever outbreak
Published: Thursday, August 4, 2016 at 2:45 p.m. Last Modified: Thursday, August 4, 2016 at 2:45 p.m.
KINSHASA, Congo (AP) ? The World Health Organization and its partners shipped more than 6 million yellow fever vaccines to Angola in February to quash an emerging epidemic, yet when they asked country officials the following month what happened to the vaccines, they discovered that about 1 million doses had mysteriously disappeared.
Of the shipments that did make it to Angola, some vaccines were sent to regions with no yellow fever cases, while others arrived at infected areas without syringes. In neighboring Congo, some vaccines weren't always kept cold enough to guarantee they would be effective.
This lack of oversight and mismanagement has undermined control of the outbreak in Central Africa, the worst yellow fever epidemic in decades, an Associated Press investigation has found.
There is now a shortage of vaccines so severe that WHO has recommended doses be diluted by 80 percent to stretch the supply, even though there is limited evidence they will be effective in African populations.
"WE HAVE A MAJOR PROBLEM ON OUR HANDS," UNICEF's Robert Kezaala wrote in capital letters in a June email to his colleagues at WHO, Doctors Without Borders and other partners.
WHO vowed after its fumbled response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa that it would adopt a "no regrets" policy to better manage future disease outbreaks with its partners in other health organizations and national governments. But according to hundreds of pages of internal emails and documents obtained by AP, the U.N. health agency is facing many of the same problems that compromised its handling of Ebola, an outbreak that killed 11,000 people in three West African countries...