The world is on the edge of an even more damaging pandemic than those seen in the past decade, according to a World Health Organisation (WHO) report.
It said global preparedness is failing to keep pace with pandemic risk, which is being exacerbated by several factors, including climate change, increased mobility and armed conflict.
The Global Preparedness Managing Board (GPMB) report, A World on the Edge, said despite considerably more knowledge, tools and resources since the Covid-19 outbreak, the deadliest respiratory pandemic since 1918, “the trajectory of pandemic risk is moving in the wrong direction”. The report warned that the potential of AI tools was being compromised by a lack of safeguards and could reduce health security.
The report was released a day after an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda was declared a public health emergency of international concern by the WHO after 80 deaths were attributed to the disease.
The WHO said the outbreak, caused by the Bundibugyo virus, did not meet the criteria of a pandemic emergency, but there was a high risk the disease could spread further to countries sharing land borders with the DRC.
The 17th outbreak in the country, where Ebola was first identified in 1976, could become much larger, given the high positivity rate in the initial samples and the increasing number of suspected cases reported, the WHO said.
The outbreak is “extraordinary” as there are no approved Bundibugyo-virus-specific therapeutics or vaccines, it said.
The DRC's dense tropical forests are a natural reservoir for the Ebola virus. The often-fatal virus, which causes fever, body aches, vomiting and diarrhoea, spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected persons, contaminated materials or persons who have died from the disease, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
The GPMB was created eight years ago in the wake of the West African Ebola epidemic to help ensure such a devastating crisis was never repeated. However, since then there have been new public health emergencies and a pandemic.
The latest GPMB report concludes that a decade since that outbreak, the world is not yet meaningfully safer.
“Health, economic, social and political impacts of health emergencies have not diminished, and in important areas are growing. In short, reforms have not kept pace with rising pandemic risk,” GPMG co-chairs Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, the president of Croatia, and Joy Phumaphi, the former health minister of Botswana, said in the foreword to the report.
“At the heart of this reality is a profound erosion of trust and unresolved inequities in access to basic services and medical countermeasures.
“The world is now on the edge — a further fracturing of public trust, and rupturing of the collective action needed to address inequities, will leave all countries even more deeply exposed to the grave, inevitable health, social and economic impacts witnessed in the last pandemic.”
They added: “The world needs a holistic, uncompromising view from outside the system, that can speak uncomfortable truths, and anchor the ongoing innovation and investment needed to be truly prepared, globally.”
The report recommended three priorities to reverse the situation: independent monitoring, equitable access to countermeasures, and sustainable financing.
It said the potential of new vaccines and breakthroughs in diagnostics and genomics were being undermined by misinformation, while geopolitical fragmentation, nationalism and commercial interests were growing. It said many societies had emerged from major health emergencies poorer, more unequal and more divided – the key drivers of pandemic risk.
“Post-crisis fragility fuels a spiralling pandemic threat,” it warned.
It said unless preparedness increased they would continue to be outpaced by new and more complex risks, leading to a future in which pandemics and other public health emergencies may become more frequent, more disruptive, and harder to manage.
The report highlighted that in 2024, the WHO detected almost twice as many health emergency events as in 2015. Although faster detection may have reduced the proportion of outbreaks that evolve into large epidemics, it said those that do break through have become high-impact events.
Global deaths due to infectious diseases fell from 25 per cent of all deaths in 2000 to 15 per cent in 2015, but jumped back to 23 per cent in 2021, due to Covid.
At the opening of the World Health Organisation’s 79th World Health Assembly in Geneva on Monday, Dr Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies programme, was given the Director-General’s Award for global health for his leadership in strengthening global health emergency preparedness and response. He helped lead responses to hundreds of disease outbreaks worldwide.
He praised workers on the emergency frontline who never gave up, and “countries that chose action and solidarity over inaction and indifference”.
He told the assembly: “Science, truth and facts matter. Public health cannot function in a world where disinformation spreads faster than disease. The most powerful asset at any emergency is trust, between governments and citizens, scientists and governments and between nations themselves.”
