Ashley Judd: The Ebola Achilles heel The first case of Ebola in the United States was diagnosed in Texas. Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took to the airwaves to assure the public that there is no risk of widespread infection. The reason: The United States has a strong health system and trained health workers who can efficiently and effectively contain Ebola. This is good news for America, but what about the rest of the world? In fact, the devastation of Ebola highlights an urgent global crisis that, as we now see, can reach into the United States: Across the world, there is a shortage of 7.2 million health workers. The United States is sending thousands of troops to West Africa to fight Ebola. In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Senegal people suffer because Ebola death stalks faster than local governments and international relief agencies can respond. Our moral imperative to respond swiftly is obvious. This is made very difficult because at least 1 billion people have little to no access to a health worker, according to the World Health Organization. The Ebola epidemic has exposed global healths Achilles heel. A big part of the reason is that the global health community has unwittingly built a system in which health advocates compete for funding allocated to specific diseases: HIV, malaria, tuberculosis -- the list goes on. Countless powerful advocacy coalitions lobby lawmakers, at conferences and in the media, but too often they dont focus their efforts and investments to address the conditions that make long-term improvements impossible to achieve: too few health workers and weak public and private health systems. Until governments, funders and global health organizations address this need, efforts to fight specific diseases --like Ebola--may succeed, but those results may be short-lived and inefficiently achieved. By Ashley Judd and Karl Hofmann
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 03:15:46 +0000
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