As the battle to snuff out the Ebola epidemic in West Africa continues, amid hopeful signs of ebbing, fears of an even more deadly and widespread infectious disease’s emerging in the future are motivating efforts to reform global health institutions that faltered in the current outbreak.
Chief among them is the World Health Organization, which has suffered withering criticism for an initially slow, disorganized and ineffective response to Ebola.
On Sunday, the W.H.O.’s executive board — representatives of 34 member states elected to help guide the agency — unanimously endorsed a resolution aimed at overhauling its capacity to head off and respond to outbreaks and other health emergencies.
“Did it have to happen this way?” a representative from Sierra Leone asked, reading the country’s statement to participants at the meeting in Geneva and referring to the large death toll from Ebola, which many viewed as avoidable with better preparedness. “There needs to be a system in place to react in a more effective and timely way.”
Critical provisions of the resolution adopted Sunday include the creation of a global cadre of emergency public health workers, the establishment of a fund that could be tapped quickly, and stepped-up support for the development of vaccines, diagnostics and treatments for emerging infectious diseases. These steps were all recommended but not put in place after a review of the response to the 2009 influenza pandemic.
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“Finance can be a strong driver of preparedness,” Joachim von Amsberg, a vice president at the World Bank, said last week in an interview about the proposal. For example, countries might be offered reduced premiums in exchange for taking certain preparedness steps, and an assured market for vaccines could help encourage manufacturers to develop new products.
There are concerns, however, that any new financing body could draw money away from the W.H.O.
“It will become yet another rival organization,” said Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health at Georgetown University, who speculated that the funding group might become a separate agency akin to GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, and to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which he said had proved more attractive to donors than the W.H.O. in the past.
The process of getting to Sunday’s resolution showed how complicated changing a large, multilateral organization can be. A technical group composed of representatives from dozens of member states, led by the United States and South Africa, worked through the night on Friday debating everything from minute wording to broad concepts of humanitarian intervention. Further measures will need to be passed by the group’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly, in May.
A version of this article appears in print on January 26, 2015, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Criticized on Ebola, U.N. Agency Backs Changes to Improve Its Emergency Response . Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
