WHO 'overstretched' in response to increasing health emergencies
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[May 23, 2023]
By Jennifer Rigby
LONDON (Reuters) - A growing number of health emergencies around the
world, from COVID-19 to cholera, have left the World Health
Organization's response "overstretched", a senior advisor said on
Tuesday.
Speaking at the U.N. agency's annual meeting, Professor Walid Ammar,
chair of a committee reviewing the WHO's emergency response, said
funding and staffing gaps were widening in the face of ever-increasing
demands.
"[The] programme is overstretched as demands have only grown with the
multiplicity and complexity of emergencies," he said.
As of March this year, the WHO was responding to 53 high-level
emergencies, a report by the committee said. These included diseases
like COVID-19, cholera and a Marburg outbreak in Equatorial Guinea and
Tanzania, as well as humanitarian emergencies like the earthquake in
Turkey and Syria and floods in Pakistan.
The report also noted that climate change was increasing the frequency
of events like floods and cyclones, all of which have health
consequences.
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Director-General of the World Health
Organisation (WHO) Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attends the World
Health Assembly at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, May
21, 2023. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
However, the emergency programme's
core budget for 2022-2023 is only about 53% funded, the report
found, calling for more stable financing.
The WHO and member states are trying to reform how the agency - and
countries - respond to health emergencies, as well as shoring up the
WHO's funding. On Monday, member states approved a new budget
including a 20% hike in their mandatory fees.
The report also called on the WHO to look for more efficiencies: for
example, in Malawi, four different emergency teams were responding
to cholera, COVID-19, polio, and flooding, in ways that may have
overlapped, it said.
(Reporting by Jennifer Rigby; Editing by Christina Fincher)
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