West must learn battle against disease is war: expert

The West must learn from its mistakes in the response to the Ebola epidemic and prepare for future global viral outbreaks as if it was going to war, a U.S. public health expert told a health conference in Australia on Tuesday.

Prof. Lawrence Gostin, director of a World Health Organization center on public health law, said the slow reaction to West Africa 's recent outbreak of Ebola was due to "bureaucratic hand-wringing " and cultural self-interest.

"Germs don't know boundaries," said the expert.

Gostin said Australia cannot assume it can lock down borders to ward off viruses.

He said a major epidemic would exhaust vaccine supplies and health workers, and cause extreme concerns in the population.

"The politics and the panic are in many ways worse than the virus itself," he said.

"We need to think of this as war," he said. Endi