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The World Health Organisation began a two-day emergency meeting on West Africa's Ebola epidemic, with the UN agency deciding whether to declare it an international crisis.
The closed-door session is tasked with ruling whether the outbreak constitutes what is known in WHO-speak as a "public health emergency of international concern".
The meeting comes as Nigeria reported its second death and Saudi Arabia said a man who had visited Sierra Leone and had returned with Ebola symptoms died at a hospital in Jeddah.
Taking the form of a telephone conference between senior WHO officials, representatives of affected countries, and experts from around the globe, the WHO meeting is not expected to made its decision public until Friday.
To date, the WHO has not issued global-level recommendations - such as travel and trade restrictions - related to the outbreak which began in Guinea and has spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria.
But the scale of concern is underlined by the WHO emergency session itself - such consultations are relatively rare.
The UN agency this year held such meetings on polio and last year on the mysterious Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.
But before that, the last emergency meeting had been during the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak.
Nigeria on Wednesday confirmed five new cases of Ebola in Lagos and a second death from the virus, bringing the total number of infections in sub-Saharan Africa's largest city to seven.
"Nigeria has now recorded seven confirmed cases of Ebola Virus Disease (EVB)," Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said.
Read more , AFP, Washington Post
The closed-door session is tasked with ruling whether the outbreak constitutes what is known in WHO-speak as a "public health emergency of international concern".
The meeting comes as Nigeria reported its second death and Saudi Arabia said a man who had visited Sierra Leone and had returned with Ebola symptoms died at a hospital in Jeddah.
Taking the form of a telephone conference between senior WHO officials, representatives of affected countries, and experts from around the globe, the WHO meeting is not expected to made its decision public until Friday.
To date, the WHO has not issued global-level recommendations - such as travel and trade restrictions - related to the outbreak which began in Guinea and has spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria.
But the scale of concern is underlined by the WHO emergency session itself - such consultations are relatively rare.
The UN agency this year held such meetings on polio and last year on the mysterious Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.
But before that, the last emergency meeting had been during the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak.
Nigeria on Wednesday confirmed five new cases of Ebola in Lagos and a second death from the virus, bringing the total number of infections in sub-Saharan Africa's largest city to seven.
"Nigeria has now recorded seven confirmed cases of Ebola Virus Disease (EVB)," Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said.
Read more , AFP, Washington Post
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