Health Desk- 20 Oct,
2019: The deadly Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)
remains an “urgent” global health emergency, the World Health Organization
(WHO) said Friday at its Emergency Committee meeting.
DRC’s latest Ebola epidemic, which began in August 2018, has
killed 2,144 people, making it the second deadliest outbreak of the virus,
after the West Africa pandemic of 2014-2016.
“The public health emergency will be maintained for an
additional three months”, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said
at a press conference.
“This outbreak remains a complex and dangerous outbreak,” he
said, deploring the lack of funding.
The status of a global health emergency is an exceptional
measure that has been used by the WHO four times: in 2009 for the Swine flu
virus, in 2014 for polio, in 2014 for the Ebola epidemic which killed more than
11,000 in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and in 2016 for the Zika virus.
Last week, the director of the WHO Emergency Program,
Michael Ryan, expressed “cautious optimism” that the epidemic was confined to a
smaller region.
The DRC health ministry said earlier this week Ebola had
returned to Ituri province in the north-east of the country after nearly 300
days without any new cases.
On Friday, the vaccine which has yet to be licensed,
received a green light from The European Medicines Agency (EMA) in a step
towards its commercialisation.
Courtesy: AFP
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