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On Friday, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Ebola epidemic running through West Africa as an international health emergency. It also appealed for international leaders to help the afflicted nations.
The UN’s health body took the decision in a rare meeting of its emergency committee, and urged the screening of everyone flying out of the affected countries, where almost 1,000 people have died due to the virus.
While the WHO didn’t call for international travel restrictions, it urged airlines to take rigid precautions while flying to West African nations hit by the epidemic. It also called on all nations to be prepared to “detect, investigate and manage” Ebola cases should they turn up.
Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO’s Director General, appealed for help for the worst hit nations by the “largest, most severe and most complex outbreak in the nearly four-decade history of this disease”.
“I am declaring the current outbreak a public health emergency of international concern”, she said, warning people of the “serious and unusual nature of the outbreak and the potential for further international spread”.
Nations like Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, which have been hit hardest by the epidemic, have declared a state of emergency. Two people have died of the disease in Nigeria, while a patient is under investigation in Benin.
Spain is also treating an elderly priest, the first case of Ebola in Europe; the priest had contracted the disease while he was helping a few patients in Liberia. US health authorities have stated that a few cases of Ebola will “inevitably” spread in other country, while the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned that the virus is “out of control”.
Chan also defined the epidemic as a public health emergency of international concern – only the re-emergence of polio last May and 2009’s H1N1 swine flu epidemic have been given the label before. She said that the label “alerts the world to the need for high vigilance”.