What the Ebola emergency means, what it doesn’t mean, and what’s next
Finally, the World Health Organization has declared the world’s latest Ebola outbreak a global health emergency. But what, exactly, does that mean?
The decision this week by the WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, to designate the long-running Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo a public health emergency of international concern generated a flood of news coverage.
Some global health experts have been vociferously insisting for months now that a PHEIC (pronounced FAKE or PHEEK) needed to be declared. They say it could improve the outbreak response and speed an end to the crisis.
But how might it do that? Read on.
What is a PHEIC?
Sometimes it’s easiest to define something by talking about what it’s not. That’s definitely the case when
