Oregon’s U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley and Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.) have urged the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare the international coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).<\/p>\n
Merkley and Young serve as the top Senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s subcommittee that oversees multilateral institutions, including the WHO, according to a statement issued via email from Merkley’s office on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Declaring the outbreak a public health emergency would enable the WHO to issue trade and travel restrictions to help contain the outbreak, and could help incentivize governments to dedicate international assistance to bolster the capacity of health systems worldwide to respond to the virus, said the statement.<\/p>\n
“We write today to express our profound concern about the outbreak of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in the People’s Republic of China, on December 27, 2019,” the Senators wrote in a letter to WHO head Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.<\/p>\n
“We urge you in your capacity as Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) to formally declare the crisis a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) and issue legally-binding country-specific recommendations to forestall the disease’s rapid spread in China and globally.”<\/p>\n
While the WHO initially declined to declare a PHEIC in a Jan. 22 emergency meeting, the Senators urged the WHO to reconsider and reverse this decision, especially considering the climbing death toll and the disease’s rapid international spread in the last several days, according to the press release.<\/p>\n
Five cases have now been confirmed within the United States, and the disease has spread to 20 countries and territories.<\/p>\n
Los senadores se\u00f1alaron que la propia definici\u00f3n de la OMS para un PHEIC \u201cimplica un evento que es grave, inusual o inesperado, con un riesgo significativo de propagaci\u00f3n global, y puede requerir una acci\u00f3n inmediata por parte de la comunidad internacional. Dada la ya alarmante proliferaci\u00f3n del brote m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de las fronteras chinas, as\u00ed como los procedimientos de detecci\u00f3n y otras medidas que pa\u00edses como Estados Unidos ya han adoptado en respuesta, cuestionamos el veredicto de la OMS de que el coronavirus no cumple con esos criterios y le instamos a que revocar la decisi\u00f3n despu\u00e9s de la pr\u00f3xima reuni\u00f3n del panel en las pr\u00f3ximas semanas\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Senators also noted that, following two earlier coronavirus epidemics — severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) — the WHO neglected to declare public health emergencies of international concern.<\/p>\n
While the WHO waited, the outbreaks spread, and each killed over 800 people, said the statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cEsperamos que esta vez la determinaci\u00f3n no se demore\u201d, concluyeron los Senadores.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oregon’s U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley and Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.) have urged the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare the international coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). Merkley and Young serve as the top Senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s subcommittee that oversees multilateral institutions, including the WHO, according to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-the-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n