International health law experts say Canada’s move to stop issuing visas to people from the affected countries contravenes the International Health Regulations (IHR), a treaty Canada helped revise after the 2003 SARS outbreak. Earlier this week the WHO asked Canada for the scientific and public health rationale underpinning the decision.

Burdened with meaning, words can hurt or help. As policymakers and public diplomats address Ebola, the word choice must be careful and consistent.

Britain made a plea for international help to deal with the world's worst Ebola outbreak at the start of a conference in London on Thursday, with one charity warning that five people are being infected with the virus every hour in Sierra Leone.

Diplomacy expert Manuel Castells defined public diplomacy as “the projection in the international arena of the values and ideas of the public." Perhaps no other international entity embodies that definition better than the People’s Health Movement (PHM), a global network that brings together grassroots health activists, civil society organizations, and academic institutions from more than 70 countries.

The UK is set to spend £2m on medical support and supplies to tackle the spread of Ebola in West Africa, the International Development Secretary Justine Greening announced today. ‘This Ebola outbreak poses a serious public health risk to West Africa,’ she said.

The World Health Organization declared a recent spread of polio to new countries to be an international public-health emergency, warning that it could undermine a lengthy and expensive eradication effort.

The world has a new epidemic on its hand: drug-resistant tuberculosis. We're not talking about the kind of TB that doctors can cure with a few weeks of standard antibiotics. This disease is way more dangerous. It outwits the best medicines we have against it and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to kill in a single person. Drug-resistant TB is on the rise around the world. And it's even cropping up here in the United States.