Medical professionals are convening this week to decide whether to declare the yellow fever outbreak in southwest Africa as an international health emergency. The World Health Organization (WHO) will conduct an emergency meeting on Thursday in Geneva to tackle the alarming spread of yellow fever that has hit hardest in Angola.

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"In my view calling an emergency committee for yellow fever is clearly the right thing to do," Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of Georgetown University's O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, told LA Times in an email.

As of May 12, there were already 2,267 suspected yellow fever cases in Angola. Up to 293 deaths have been recorded since the outbreak started in December in Luanda.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 44 suspected cases have been recorded. Some of the infected patients had reportedly been to Angola.

In China, 11 people who traveled from Angola tested positive for yellow fever, emphasizing "the risk of international spread through non-immunised travelers," the WHO said.

Even though vaccines are effective and relatively affordable, only a few percentage of the African population have been immunized.

WHO has already sent 11.7 million doses of vaccinations against yellow fever to Angola and plans to immunize 2.2 million people in DR Congo.

Yellow fever is contracted from a bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which also carry the Zika virus. Patients affected with yellow fever show symptoms of high temperatures, bleeding that eventually results in shock, and multiple organs failure. According to WHO officials, between 20 and 50 percent of those who manifest jaundice, or the "yellow" phase, die from the virus.

On the other hand, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is worried that people who travel to Africa and South America could come back with the yellow fever virus infection. The health agency has advised people traveling to yellow fever-infected countries to review vaccine recommendations and requirements first and inquire about their need for immunizations. 

TagsWHO, outbreak, yellow fever, Angola, china, Congo, south america, Africa