Ebola No Longer International Emergency

The World Health Organisation has announced that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and subsequent emergency is no longer an official international emergency.

The Ebola outbreak, which started back in December of 2013, ravaged through the Western parts of Africa for close to two years and claimed the lives of more than 12 000 people.

Margaret Chan, chief of the World Health Organisation, has said that the international Ebola emergency has been officially ended after it was first announced as an international emergency in August of 2014.

“…[sic] The Ebola outbreak in West Africa no longer constitutes a public health emergency of international concern…The risk of international spread is now low, and… countries currently have the capacity to respond rapidly to new virus emergences,” she said in a statement.

The West African countries that were hit the hardest by the Ebola outbreak was Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

And while these three countries have been declared Ebola free and the international emergency status has been lifted, the WHO also stressed that these countries need to be vigilant as they can still be prone to flare ups of the disease:

“…Particularly important will be to ensure that communities can rapidly and fully engage in any future response, cases are quickly isolated and managed,” Margaret Chan concluded.