H.E. Dr. Sinéad Walsh:

Yes, absolutely. The publication of the report was very timely because it reminds us that this has now been going on for a year, which is incredible. The one point I would made with regard to the national governments is that I do not think we could ever have expected any national government, and certainly not governments as challenged in other areas provertywise as Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, to come up with any kind of robust response to this crisis.

Even at the time last summer when this was all starting off we knew that an urban Ebola crisis at this scale has never happened before, so let us not have very high expectations that individual governments can respond in a robust way. This is why in our lobbying we always focused very much on the international community gearing up, coming in and accompanying those countries in a very significant way, and we did not see that. I think MSF is right. It was right when it tried to raise the alarm about this last spring. I know the WHO had an executive board meeting in January at which it asked what did this mean for it and one of the initiatives it has agreed is to do an independent evaluation, with no holds barred, and examine what it could do within its system. We need to stick on this point because when the crisis is over and we start focusing on other things, it will be very easy to let these lessons slip. Many of these lessons came up previously after the bird 'flu pandemic and we would say now that it is a pity we did not do anything about them then. There is a challenge for all of us to push the international health system to make these reforms now and not wait for another global crisis. It is good for MSF and others to push this issue and keep it on the agenda until we see those reforms.