WHO to Hold Special Session on Ebola Next Month: Principal Legal Officer

The special session of the WHO executive board will deal with the most immediate problems and ways to improve WHO capacity to deal with all future outbreaks.

MOSCOW, December 9 (Sputnik) — The World Health Organization (WHO) will address the Ebola threat early next month at a special session of its executive board, the Principal Legal Officer at the organization told Sputnik news agency Tuesday.

"It has been decided that there will be a special session known as WHO executive board. The executive board is part of the governance of the WHO that can move more quickly than the whole plenary, so there will be a special session just dealing with Ebola later next month and it is going to look at all aspects of this issue," Steven Solomon said on the sidelines of the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons.

The session will deal with the most immediate problems, measures that should be taken in the long term, and ways to improve WHO capacity to deal with all future outbreaks. Moreover, strengthening International Health Regulations (IHR) will be discussed.

"All of that is going to be looked at, it is going to be a very important meeting," Solomon said adding that the meeting will underscore the ongoing process to step up the response in the affected countries and worldwide.

He also underlined that countries needed to be well-prepared to detect, report, and respond to any disease outbreak. However, the Ebola experience demonstrates that in certain areas these capacities need strengthening.

The current Ebola epidemic started in southern Guinea in December 2013 and soon spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Senegal. As of December 8, there have been 17,800 confirmed, probable, and suspected cases of Ebola, with a total of 6,331 having been killed by the virus, according to WHO estimates.