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Today, Brazilian diplomats serve key roles in health and other ministries to assure policy coherence across the government; they have also provided leadership in key multinational health negotiations such as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. The Global Health Security Initiative (GHSI) is an international partnership to strengthen health preparedness and response globally to biological, chemical, radio-nuclear and pandemic influenza threats.

he interface between trade and health is, in fact, on the cutting edge of health diplomacy. Health professionals need to understand this interaction to assure rational trade agreements, informed by health needs and supported through progressive foreign policy.6

It may not matter which takes preference, but it is clear that the growing concern for multilateral cooperation on critical global health problems requires purposeful engagement in learning across these two sectors. In addition, there is a need to include nongovernmental actors, philanthropy and the private sector in this exciting new field of study.

The World Food Program, acting beyond its core mandate as the United Nations agency responsible for fighting hunger, is also joining the drive, planning to build up to 30 Ebola treatment centers capable of handling 3,000 patients, said Denise Brown, the agency’s regional director for West Africa.

American troops are already on the ground in Liberia to build treatment centers, and Britain announced on Wednesday that it would send about 600 military personnel to Sierra Leone to build units and train local staff members. But it remains unclear who will manage and operate the units.

After Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippines at the end of 2013, the W.H.O. had the support of 151 aid agencies. Six months into the Ebola crisis in three countries, only four medical organizations are on the ground.

Those powers were enhanced in 1892 to try to prevent another scourge, cholera

“Why are the British here? To end Ebola, or party?” read a headline in a local newspaper. It added, “While their American counterparts are working hard to end Ebola in Liberia, our so-called colonial masters are busy living the life of Riley.”

Like others, the official kept citing the “Brits’ primacy” in Sierra Leone — a reference to how, several months ago, Western powers divided Ebola responsibilities in West Africa along historical lines, with the United States helping Liberia, a nation founded by freed American slaves in 1822; France helping a former colony, Guinea; and Britain helping its own former colony, Sierra Leone.

Many aid officials in Sierra Leone said they crave a more effective command structure. The government runs a national emergency center, but aid officials said that with scores of foreign experts, government delegations and private charities flocking here, coordination was still messy, with many gaps and overlaps. It is extremely difficult, they said, to get even the most basic information, including how many treatment centers exist.

There are also growing questions about corruption, with the government announcing recently that it had found 6,000 “ghost medical workers” on its payroll, even as real Ebola burial teams and front-line health officers say they have not been paid in weeks.

He said that the region’s chiefs enlisted the traditional leaders in the area and put together bylaws that barred residents from hiding their sick, interfering with health workers or carrying out traditional burials that increased the risk of spreading the disease by touching infected corpses.

We threatened that anybody who tried to do a traditional burial would be banished from the chiefdom,” he said

Sierra Leone and Liberia have both emerged from horrific civil wars and managed to rebuild their economies.