On Monday, a year after the start of the outbreak of Ebola that ravaged west Africa, killing more than 10 000 people and infecting at least 25 000, Médecins Sans Frontières launched a blistering attack on the tardy international response to the epidemic. Describing how precious months were lost after the disease took hold in the forests of Guinea and rapidly spread to towns and cities in Sierra Leone and Liberia, MSF castigated the World Health Organisation for failing to respond quickly or sufficiently.In those early months the fight was left to overwhelmed health workers in the three countries - already decimated by war and poverty - and emergency medical assistance groups such as MSF to try to check the spread of the deadly virus.Many lives - including those of doctors and nurses - were lost before the WHO set up a regional hub for co-ordinating the response in July.MSF also accused the Guinea and Sierra Leone governments of failing to admit the scale of the crisis, and of hampering the efforts of response teams. It said that the world took decisive action to halt the spread of the disease only after an American doctor and a Spanish nurse were infected.It is hard to fault the MSF critique: the WHO has conceded that its initial response was inadequate and plans to set up a rapid response team to deal with similar outbreaks.But it also needs to be said that, once the world woke up to the scale of the crisis, the response was on a huge scale and effective.Military field hospitals were quickly set up and countries as diverse as the US, Cuba, China France and South Africa sent personnel and equipment to the Ebola zone.Major strides have been made in containing Ebola - to the extent that today it no longer represents a global security threat.The next step, surely, is to help the affected countries build decent health facilities, staffed by sufficient trained personnel to deal with any future outbreaks...