India, April 4 -- NEW DELHI: The World Health Organization (WHO) is facing criticism for not allowing reforms that could enable the planet's premier health agency to respond with speed and agility to today's global health challenges. Experts say that some reform measures are pending for decades and were not implemented by the WHO even after witnessing mishandling during the Ebola virus outbreak.

In his study, Devi Sridhar of the University of Oxford and Lawrence O. Gostin of the Georgetown University Law Center in 2011 said: "In December 2010, Jack Chow, the former WHO assistant Director-General asked, 'Is the WHO becoming irrelevant?' A month later, the WHO's executive board considered the agency's future within global health governance...