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| Dangote |
The African
Union (AU) on Wednesday announced the deployment of 250 Nigerian medics to
Ebola-ravaged Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Volunteers
from other African countries are expected to join the Nigerians in the epicentre
of the outbreak.
The chairman
of the AU Commission, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, urged airlines to resume flights
to the three worst-hit West African nations, who she said were currently “very
isolated.”
She also
urged Africa’s private sector to fund the fight against the epidemic, citing
the example of giant South African-based telephone network MTN which donated
$10 million and Nigerian tycoon Aliko Dangote who has pledged three million
dollars.
The Ebola
outbreak was officially declared over in Nigeria on October 20. Twenty cases
were recorded and only eight people died due to the rapid and effective
response of authorities.
“We are
going to share our experience on how we managed our containment of the
epidemic,” the director of the Nigerian National Centre for Disease Control,
Professor Abdulsalami Nasidi, told AFP.
In October,
Dlamini-Zuma said that AU members had committed to send more than a thousand
health officers, particularly from the Democratic Republic of Congo, to fight
Ebola.
The Ebola
outbreak ravaging West Africa has claimed 6,070 lives, according to the latest
WHO update, with the vast majority of deaths in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra
Leone.
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