Pregnant and breastfeeding women will be given the experimental Ebola vaccine, marking a U-turn in World Health Organization (WHO) policy.

A meeting of the WHO's expert vaccine advisory group reversed a previous decision to deny pregnant women the vaccine because there was not enough evidence of its safety.

Pregnant women are usually excluded from all immunisation campaigns because vaccines against infectious diseases like Ebola are rarely tested or approved for use in pregnant women.

This approach has led to anger among some that women are being put at unnecessarily risk during the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Studies of previous outbreaks show that between 80 and 90 per cent of all pregnant women who contracted the disease died. Very few babies of Ebola-affected mothers have survived.

But the latest recommendations from WHO's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (Sage) on immunisation said that because of the severity of the outbreak pregnant women should be included in the campaign, as long as they and their babies are monitored.