United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations Power says: This is a crisis that is so vast, with needs so great, with potential consequences so dire, that no country can afford to stand on the sidelines. A few are doing a lot. But a lot are doing very little, or nothing at all. It is well past time to join what is a historic, groundbreaking, lifesaving mission – a noble mission. We need more doctors and more nurses. More beds and more treatment facilities. More personal protective equipment. More burial teams and more ambulances. More cell phones. More SIM cards. More motorbikes and trucks and helicopters. More plastic gloves, more bleach and more thermometers. And the list goes on and on. And even if we are able to build a bed for every infected person, and even if we can eventually ensure every one of those individuals gets the quality care needed to have a fighting chance of survival, that still will not be enough. We need to move beyond treating the sick to preventing new infections – in the affected countries, in neighboring countries, and in nations around the world. We have been playing defense with Ebola. Now we also need to go on offense. To do that, we need more contact tracing teams, who can reach more communities with greater speed. We need more accurate, real-time data collection, which can be shared across borders; not only for tracking the virus’ spread, but also to anticipate and preempt its next moves. And we need more effective public awareness campaigns, hyper-targeted to the most marginalized populations, which are often the most vulnerable. Every single one of these gaps must be filled. The longer we wait to fill them, the longer the virus will replicate and the more that it will kill. In addition to gaps, we have other concerns. There is a risk we will fall back on business-as-usual and process-heavy solutions, which locate decision-making in far-away capitals, rather than empowering people on the ground to adapt their tactics to what is happening day-to-day. Too often, we have seen, the international community provides resources that cannot easily be re-purposed rather than providing resources that are flexible, and which governments and humanitarian groups can adapt to the evolving crisis on the ground. We tend to plot out static, long-term plans to respond to the outbreak, and then stick to them, rather than developing fluid structures that can move with the virus, a virus whose movement is difficult to predict. There is a risk, too, that we will spend billions of dollars vanquishing the virus but leave behind little more than broken healthcare systems, fragile infrastructures, and the memory of a remarkable anti-Ebola surge that then receded. Instead, we must ensure that at every opportunity we help create and deepen local capacity through partnership with governments, with teachers, with local institutions and local NGOs. So my first point is that we need to do much, much more.- READ DETAILS Below
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 18:48:31 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015