Health experts meet over Ebola in Accra
Experts from the West African Health Organisation (WAHO) have wrapped up their two-day meeting in Accra with proposals on how West African leaders could contain the Ebola virus disease (EVD) in the sub-region.
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The experts are keeping the details of their proposals to their chest until they present them to ECOWAS Ministers of Health who are scheduled to meet in Accra today.
Meeting
The meeting, which was also attended by representatives of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the American Centre for Disease Control, reviewed measures and identified strategies to control the spread of Ebola.
The experts, some of whom came from the affected countries; Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria, also drafted recommendations to be addressed to various authorities in countries that had not reported EVD cases.
The meeting was briefed on the progress made by WAHO to contain the disease, as well as some of the challenges the organisation had encountered and the way forward.
Experts from the four countries that had experienced the disease made presentations on the epidemiological situation and how they had been able to implement recommendations from various meetings, the difficulties that they had faced, and the prospects.
The meeting, which was broken into seven sessions over the two-day period, also heard presentations by participants from countries that had not reported Ebola cases, on measures they had taken to prevent Ebola in their countries.
The meeting of Ministers of Health from ECOWAS, which would also be attended by the Director-General of WAHO, Dr Xavier Crespin, would be the second high-powered meeting to be organised in Accra since the outbreak of the disease in West Africa.
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WHO Emergency Meeting
The first meeting, organised from July 2 to 3, 2014, by the WHO, came out with a 22-point communique which called on governments, international partners and the WHO itself to help combat the disease.
It called on governments to mobilise the relevant sectors to improve awareness and understanding of the Ebola situation to enable them to achieve a more effective response.
On the part of the WHO, the communique, among others, asked it to disseminate information on the disease to the public and ensure that health professionals were provided with more information on how to prevent and control Ebola.
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