Dr. Santino Severoni:

I will try to be quick. Yes, there is a role. We have this role and we have been trying to play it in the best way we could. I agree with the Deputy that we have been seeing all sorts of situations but there is something that is still not properly understood across Europe, and I am telling him this because once a year we meet all member states so we have a chance to see the different positions.

I mentioned during my presentation that southern European countries need to deal with an emergency response. This means they need to be ready to receive and manage a large number of people who, unfortunately, will probably arrive suddenly overnight, which is likely to disrupt the services of the receiving country. The more the country wants to have border controls, registration and police inspection of those people, the heavier their distress will be. Basically, a bottleneck will be created unless properly prepared plans and intersectoral collaboration between police and the ministry of the interior in that sector have been put in place.

We realise that this situation was not present everywhere. The only country with a meaningful preparedness capacity was Cyprus because in 1996, it had to face an influx of people from Lebanon. When we say we have a role, we mean we have been working with ministries of health and ministries of the interior in most of the southern European countries to help them set up capacity, preparedness facilities and procedures in order to manage the migrant process. Police control or registration procedures from the ministries of the interior cannot do everything and we want to help these countries to set up a common plan to manage this situation, which has not arisen before. It seems a very simple, banal issue but it was not being dealt with, although the flow of irregular migration has been happening for at least two decades.

With regard to the other questions, in particular the question of public health, we are deeply concerned about hard-to-reach groups of population which would not be covered or would not have access to services because, for us, this would be a failure. I was the director of the WHO country office in Tajikistan, which had the largest polio outbreak in the world in 2009. It was a very serious situation. Basically, the polio outbreak happened because the country was unable to immunise children in remote areas in the valleys and the mountains. They had been immunising children year by year but the number of unvaccinated children was growing and this exploded like a bomb, not only in Tajikistan but in all of Central Asia and Russia. It was something that could have been managed with a few hundred thousand dollars worth of vaccines but it has cost the community more than $50 million to respond to the tragedy.

With regard to the Ebola virus, I am not involved in the response procedures so I am in a difficult position but I do have some experience of emergency response. During an emergency, there is only the response. The evaluation of what has been functioning or not functioning, and whether there has been a failure or not, comes only when we have finished saving lives. More than rating success or failure, my colleagues should be and are focusing on trying to respond to this question, which is still very complicated. A committee member asked whether we have enough people going there and the answer is that we do not. If anyone opens the vacancies page on the WHO website, they will see that two thirds of vacancies for the West Africa Ebola response have not been filled. We are continuing to recruit and would welcome colleagues going there.