By PATRICK REEVELL

Russian President Vladimir Putin has unexpectedly announced that his country has invented the world’s most effective drug against Ebola.

At a government meeting today, Putin told officials that Russia had registered a new medicine against the deadly illness for which an effective treatment remained elusive, the Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported. The latest outbreak of the highly contagious virus has ravaged West Africa for the past two years.

“We have good news. We have registered a medicine for the Ebola fever, which after the relevant tests, has proven to have a high effectiveness, higher than those drugs which until now have been used in the world,” Putin said.

There has been no proven cure for Ebola so far, although rapid progress has been made towards vaccines since the beginning of the current outbreak in 2014, which has killed almost 11,000 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to World Health Organization figures.

Putin did not give details about the new drug, but it appeared to be a vaccine developed by Russian scientists that health authorities here have previously said was close to completion. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets announced in December that trials of the vaccine were proving successful and Russia’s health ministry has said it had had minimal side-effects on the 200 volunteers it was tested on.

Other Ebola vaccines have already been developed and successfully tested in the countries affected by the Ebola epidemic. A vaccine produced by the American drug company Merck was tested by the WHO in Guinea last year, and preliminary findings suggest a high success rate after being tested on more than 4,000 patients.

Russian officials offered no immediate figures on how their vaccine compared with this or other vaccines that have had a high rate of success in the countries suffering from the epidemic.

Putin's announcement comes just as the WHO is expected to declare the Ebola epidemic over. It’s now 42 days since the last registered Ebola case in Liberia -- well beyond the 21-day incubation period of the virus.

ABC NEWS