GENEVA — By early June of last year, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa was the deadliest ever recorded. There weren’t enough beds to treat patients and many were refusing to seek treatment, driving the outbreak underground.

Senior staffers in Africa at the World Health Organization raised the prospect of declaring an international emergency. The answer from WHO’s Geneva headquarters: Wait.

According to internal emails and documents obtained by The Associated Press, the U.N. health agency resisted sounding the international alarm until August, a two-month delay that some argue may have cost lives. More than 10,000 are believed to have been killed by the virus since WHO announced the outbreak a year ago.

WHO has acknowledged acting too slowly to control the Ebola epidemic. In its defense, the agency says the virus’s spread was unprecedented and blames several factors, including lack of resources and intelligence from the field.

Internal documents obtained by AP, however, show WHO’s top leaders were informed of how dire the situation was. But they held off on declaring an emergency in part because it could have angered the countries involved, interfered with their mining interests or restricted the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in October.

Declaring an emergency was “a last resort,” Dr. Sylvie Briand, who runs WHO’s pandemic and epidemic diseases department, said in a June 5 email to a colleague who floated the idea. “It may be more efficient to use other diplomatic means for now.”

Five days after Briand’s email, WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan was sent a memo that warned cases might soon appear in Mali, Ivory Coast and Guinea Bissau.