WHO launching $100 million plan to combat Ebola

The World Health Organisation is launching a $100 million response plan to combat an "unprecendented" outbreak of Ebola in West Africa that has killed 729 people out of 1,323 infected since February, the agency said on Thursday.
 
WHO Director-General Margaret Chan will meet in Conakry, Guinea on Friday with the presidents of affected West African nations, the United Nations health agency said in a statement.
 
"The scale of the Ebola outbreak, and the persistent threat it poses, requires WHO and Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to take the response to a new level and this will require increased resources, in-country medical expertise, regional preparedness and coordination," said Chan. Clinical doctors and nurses, epidemiologists, and logisticians are urgently needed, she said. 

Earlier, the World Health Organization said that the death toll from an outbreak of Ebola in West Africa has risen to 729, after 57 deaths were reported between July 24 and 27 in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.               

The WHO also said Nigerian authorities had so far identified 59 people who had come into contact with a U.S. citizen who died in Lagos last week after traveling from Liberia, via Togo and Ghana.

Sierra Leone declared a state of emergency and called in troops to quarantine epicentres of Ebola on Thursday, joining Liberia in imposing tough controls to curb the worst ever outbreak of the virus amid fears it could spread beyond West Africa.     

Ebola has been blamed for 672 deaths in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, according to the World Health Organization. It has also reached Nigeria's biggest city Lagos, where authorities said on Friday a man had died of the virus.        

In a measure of rising international concern, Britain on Wednesday held a government meeting on Ebola, which it said was a threat it needed to respond to.       

But international airlines association IATA said the WHO was not recommending any travel restrictions or border closures due to the outbreak, and there would be a low risk to other passengers if an Ebola patient flew..           

The outbreak of the hemorrhagic fever, for which there is no known cure, began in the forests of remote eastern Guinea in February, but Sierra Leone now has the highest number of cases.          

Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma said he would meet with the leaders of Liberia and Guinea in Conakry on Friday to discuss the epidemic and that he was cancelling a visit to Washington for a U.S.-Africa summit next week.          

"Sierra Leone is in a great fight ... Failure is not an option," Koroma said in a speech late on Wednesday, adding that the state of emergency would initially last between 60 and 90 days. "Extraordinary challenges require extraordinary measures."      

Ebola's symptoms include external bleeding, massive internal bleeding, vomiting and diarrhea in its final stages. The disease kills up to 90 percent of those infected, though the fatality rate in the current epidemic is running at around 60 percent.         

The president said police and the military would enforce a quarantine on all epicenters of the disease, and would provide support to health officers and NGOs to do their work unhindered, following a number of attacks on health workers by local communities.      

House-to-house searches would be implemented to trace Ebola victims and homes where the disease was identified would be quarantined until cleared by medical teams, he said, announcing a ban on all public meetings except those related to Ebola.        

Liberia on Wednesday announced the closure of all schools across the country and said it was considering quarantining affected communities.          

The U.S. Peace Corps said it was withdrawing 340 volunteers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea after two of them came in contact with a person who later died of the virus.