MOSCOW, August 6 (RIA Novosti) – As the death toll in the outbreak of the lethal Ebola virus continues to rise, the World Health Organization said it will hold a two-day meeting of its emergency committee Wednesday to assess whether we are dealing with a global emergency, according to WHO head Margaret Chan.
“On 6-7 August, the World Health Organization (WHO) will convene an IHR Emergency Committee meeting in order to ascertain whether the ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa,” it said in an announcement.
The meeting’s main goal is to determine whether the outbreak constitutes a “public health emergency of international concern,” and if it does, the WHO will seek to develop a set of temporary measures to curb the spread of the deadly virus.
Following the consultation, the international health authority will hold a press conference on August 8.
Margaret Chan stressed previously the consequences of this new outbreak “can be catastrophic in terms of lost lives, but also severe socio-economic disruption and a high risk of spread to other countries.”
In a bid to assess the risks, Russian virologists earlier visited two Guinean hospitals – Clinique Ambroise Pare and the Donka Hospital – in the stricken capital Conakry, in West Africa.
The new Ebola outbreak was first registered in Guinea in February and then spilt over into Sierra Leone and Liberia. The WHO has updated its estimates of the number of cases and the current death tally to correspondingly 1,603 and 887. It is also the deadliest outbreak reported to date.
