WSJ.com - In WHO Bunker, Experts Track Deadly Diseases: "GENEVA -- Some two dozen disease experts meet every morning at nine in an underground room at the World Health Organization headquarters here to scrutinize the latest reports of infectious disease.
The 18 outbreaks being tracked on a recent morning in the bunker, hub of the WHO's alert and response operations, ranged from polio in Indonesia and avian flu in Vietnam to anthrax in Guinea-Bissau and the Marburg virus in Angola.
With a giant electronic map of the African nation projected on a screen in front of him, one WHO official fretted that the Congolese government hadn't yet provided virus samples for labs to confirm the disease. Another suggested that if the outbreak worsened, an isolation unit in use in Angola for the Marburg outbreak -- including specially trained staff, protective clothing, generators and other gear -- could be moved to the Congo.
Known officially as the Strategic Health Operations Center, the WHO bunker is home to a high-tech effort to track and respond to infectious-disease outbreaks around the world. Officials here organize lab tests, purchase and ship medical supplies and coordinate the activities of local health authorities. In addition to the electronic maps, the room has four large plasma TV screens, computers and a satellite-video system that can simultaneously link 180 people, including the WHO's 148 country and regional offices, with scores of health ministries and labs world-wide....
But what got everyone's attention was an email received over the previous weekend from the Ministry of Health in the Republic of Congo. A band of elephant hunters in the country's northern rain forests, along with several people with whom they were in contact, had died from an acute form of hemorrhagic fever. The team in the WHO bunker feared the worst: a re-emergence of Ebola, the deadly virus that killed scores of people in the same area two years ago."...
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