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Technical consultations kick off to help hardest-hit West African countries recover from Ebola

Xinhua, July 10, 2015 Adjust font size:

Technical consultations of the International Ebola Recovery Conference started here Thursday in a bid to help Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the three West African countries hardest hit by Ebola last year, to better recover.

"The consultations, led by the three impacted countries, will focus on discussions on the recovery process," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said at a daily news briefing here, adding that finance ministers of the three countries are expected to present their 24-month recovery plans.

At 3 p.m. EDT, David Nabarro, the UN special envoy for Ebola, and Sunil Saigal, an official from the UN Development Programme ( UNDP), are expected to brief the press here ahead of the high- level conference slated for Friday, Dujarric said.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, presidents of the affected countries, as well as high-level representatives from the African Union, the African Development Bank, the European Union, the Islamic Development Bank and other partner organizations are expected to participate in the Friday segment at UN Headquarters in New York, he said.

The conference, which starts Friday morning, aims to ensure that the Ebola affected countries receive the support and resources they need.

In early June, there were 31 new cases of Ebola reported in a growing geographic area in Guinea and Sierra Leone, the World Health Organization said. At the beginning of the second week in June, 14 additional cases were reported.

The latest figures mark the second straight week that the number of Ebola cases in West Africa has increased, reports said.

In March, the World Health Organization painted a grim picture of the biggest-ever Ebola outbreak, estimating that the virus had killed more than 10,000 people, mostly in the three West African countries.

Fifteen other Ebola deaths also occurred in Mali, Nigeria and the United States.

When Ebola was first detected in March 2014 in Guinea's forest, officials assumed the deadly virus could quickly be stamped out, just as it had in more than two dozen previous outbreaks, mostly in central and eastern Africa.

However, health officials now acknowledge they were too slow to respond to this emergency, allowing Ebola to cross porous borders in a region where broken health systems were unable to stop its spread. Endite