Impact of Ebola crisis on the security of global health?

The Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa has not just illustrated the absence of political commitment towards public health, but it has also initiated discussions on the security of global health. A group comprising of leading practitioners of health have now presented their thoughts on the impact of this epidemic in several essays published in The Lancet. In this essay, Different perspectives have been critically looked at on what the Ebola outbreak has got to teach us. In areas like health care access for individuals, the epidemic can increase political commitment for improving healthy security and how other related issues like antimicrobial resistance are relevant to the security of health have been investigated.

Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, London, UK and lead author of the review, David L.Heymann has described health security as being essentially the protection from various threats to health.

The professor said that throughout history, the approach to threats like the Ebola epidemic has been focused on rapid response and rapid detection of these outbreaks. According to him, this approach has overtime become the commonly understood concept of healthy security for several centuries. But, the Ebola crisis has highlighted a second and equally crucial aspect of global health security that is not considered and that is making accessibility to health products and services more accessible at a personal level around the globe. He also said that this should be better recognized as an integral part in the scope of global health security.

One of the essays also made a suggestion that global healthy security has remained politically neglected for over a decade through the lesser importance given by the WHO and the legal noncompliance by certain countries.

source: http://www.dispatchtimes.com/