The World Health Organization is nothing if not opportunistic, impulsively jumping on every public health issue that makes the front page. And it always calls for lots more money to throw at the disease-of-the-month. The latest on the WHO's radar is the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa, which has tallied about 1,500 cases. To address it, WHO wants more than $430 million--from governments, development banks, the private sector and in-kind contributions.
The plan, outlined in a document to be published soon and reported on by Bloomberg News, purportedly seeks to reverse the trend in new cases within two months and to stop all transmission in six to nine months.
This grandiose proposal sounds like something a precocious but naive undergraduate might come up with for a project in Public Health 101. Ebola is highly lethal, killing more than half of those it infects, but it is not highly contagious. Transmission requires intimate contact with bodily fluids from someone who is infected and symptomatic, so it is highly unlikely to cause a widespread epidemic.
Infectious diseases remain the scourge of poorer populations, including those that inhabit much of Africa, but the Ebola virus is not high on the list. Malaria is. Consider the WHO's own assessment of its importance:
"About 3.4 billion people--half of the world's population--are at risk of malaria. In 2012, there were about 207 million malaria cases . . . and an estimated 627,000 malaria deaths."
But in virtually all poor, malaria-endemic countries, there is inadequate access to antimalarial medicines. That $430 million now sought for Ebola would buy and distribute a lot of those drugs and benefit far more people.
Aside from malaria, hundreds of millions of people suffer from neglected tropical diseases, including lymphatic filariasis and cholera. And the number of new cases of tuberculosis worldwide is increasing, with the growing emergence of multidrug-resistant strains of the bacteria especially worrisome.
According to UN statistics, about 15 percent of the world's population lacks access to safe drinking water. More than 2.5 billion don't have access to adequate sanitation. Primitive approaches to managing sewage continue to spread infections such as schistosomiasis, trachoma, viral hepatitis and cholera.
In a world of limited health-care resources, we need to make hard decisions that will deliver high-impact outcomes for the most people at the least cost. Spending nearly half a billion dollars on curbing Ebola virus infections would be a poor choice.
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Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Editorial on 09/01/2014