West Africa's Ebola-hit nations imposed stringent new rules on Thursday to tackle the world's worst-ever outbreak of the tropical virus and agreed to launch a $100 million response plan at an emergency regional summit. The leaders of Sierra Leone and Liberia have cancelled trips next week for a US-Africa summit in Washington and instead will meet in Guinea on Friday "to take the response to a new level," the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.
The three countries are struggling to contain an epidemic that has infected more than 1,300 people since the start of the year, hit major cities and sparked alarm over its possible spread to other nations. The WHO raised the death toll by 57 to 729 on Thursday, announcing that 122 new cases had been detected between Thursday and Sunday last week.
"The Ebola virus disease poses an extraordinary challenge to our nation," Sierra Leone's leader Ernest Bai Koroma said in a televised address to the nation. "Consequently... I hereby proclaim a state of public emergency to enable us to take a more robust approach to deal with the Ebola outbreak." Koroma confirmed he had cancelled a trip to the summit of around 50 African leaders in Washington next week.
He announced a raft of measures as part of the state of emergency, including quarantining Ebola-hit areas and cancelling foreign trips by ministers. Sierra Leone, which has seen 233 deaths, on Thursday buried medic Umar Khan, described by Koroma as a "national hero" who saved the lives of more than 100 Ebola patients before succumbing to the tropical bug. The current outbreak of Ebola, which started at the beginning of this year, has killed 55 percent of those it has infected.
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