"Mr. [Ismail] Ould Cheikh Ahmed [of Mauritania] succeeds Anthony Banbury of the United States, who will return to New York in early January 2015. The [UN] Secretary-General [Ban Ki-moon] expresses his gratitude to Mr. Banbury for his vision and leadership of UNMEER, and for his commitment to fighting this unprecedented Ebola outbreak," the United Nations said in a statement Thursday.
Ould Cheikh Ahmed is currently Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General and Deputy Head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya. Most of UN staff have been evacuated from Libya due to the lack of security in the country.
UNMEER was established in September, amid a continuing Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa. The outbreak started in December, 2013 in Guinea and later spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Senegal. Several Ebola cases have been reported in the United States and Europe.
As of December 8, there have been 17,800 confirmed, probable, and suspected cases of Ebola, with a total of 6,331 having been killed by the virus, according to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates.
