The World Health Organiaation (WHO) Thursday is scheduled to issue a "roadmap" to guide and coordinate the international response to the outbreak of Ebola virus disease in West Africa, according to statement issued in Geneva, report agencies.
The aim is to stop ongoing Ebola transmission worldwide within 6-9 months, while rapidly managing the consequences of any further international spread.
Meanwhile, Ebola-hit nations met for crisis talks Thursday as the death toll topped 1,500 and the WHO warned that the number of cases could exceed 20,000 before the outbreak is stemmed.
'It also recognizes the need to address, in parallel, the broader socio-economic impact of outbreak. It responds to the urgent need to dramatically scale up the international response. Nearly 40per cent of the total number of reported cases has occurred within the past three weeks'.
The roadmap was informed by comments received from a large number of partners, including health officials in the affected countries, the African Union, development banks, other UN agencies, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), and countries providing direct financial support. It will serve as a framework for updating detailed operational plans.
Nigeria announced that the virus had reached its oil-producing hub, dashing hopes that the country had successfully contained it to its biggest city, Lagos.
Hopes were raised meanwhile of a vaccine for the haemmorhagic fever after British medical charity the Wellcome Trust and pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline said safety trials on a new drug could begin as soon as next month.
But new figures from the WHO showed the scale of the crisis. It said it was working on an assumption that it would take six to nine months to bring the epidemic under control, by which time the number of infections could have passed 20,000.
"That's not saying we expect 20,000, that's not saying we would accept, more importantly, 20,000 cases," Bruce Aylward, the WHO's head of emergency programmes, told reporters in Geneva.
"But we have got to have a system that is robust enough to deal with ... a very bad case scenario."
As of August 26, 1,552 people had been confirmed dead from Ebola in four countries -- Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Nigeria -- while 3,062 had been infected.
But Aylward warned that the actual caseload could be "two to four times higher than the number of cases you see reported."
Health ministers from member states of the West African regional bloc ECOWAS were meeting on Thursday in the Ghanaian capital Accra to discuss how to strengthen its response to the devastating outbreak.
As the meeting began, Nigeria's health minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said a doctor in the southeastern city of Port Harcourt had become the sixth person to die of Ebola and the first outside Lagos.
