The European Union’s national leaders have asked Christos Stylianides, Cyprus’s incoming European commissioner, to co-ordinate the bloc’s efforts to curb the spread of Ebola.

The appointment of Stylianides was the biggest outcome linked to the disease from the first day of a two-day summit of EU leaders in Brussels. Ebola was the subject of a couple of hours of debate at the start of the summit, during which the British prime minister, David Cameron, was said to have upbraided other EU leaders for giving too little aid to counter the threat from the disease. Earlier, a British official had pointedly commented that the furniture company IKEA’s contribution to efforts to counter Ebola – €5 million – was greater than that of 18 EU states. The UK has contributed €156m.

Stylianides will on 1 November become the European commissioner for humanitarian aid and crisis management, a position that would in any case have made him a central figure in the EU’s response to the disease.

Both as a European commissioner and as the newly appointed co-ordinator for Ebola, Stylianides will be active beyond Europe’s borders, as the European Commission and the EU’s member states have already promised aid totalling more than €500 million to countries hit by or threatened by Ebola, most of them in West Africa. The role, though, will also require Stylianides to co-ordinate the emerging response of the threat of Ebola spreading into the EU’s member states. To date, the EU’s member states’ efforts within Europe have focused on screening travellers from West Africa at the EU’s borders and at readying their national systems to cope with a crisis.

Eight people with Ebola have been treated in the EU so far, three of whom have died. This compares with the global tally of an estimated 4,500 deaths.

The announcement of Stylianides’s appointment contains few details about the role envisaged for the Cypriot or about how the Ebola crisis might amplify his mandate as European commissioner.

The European Commission plays a central role in co-ordinating EU states’ responses to international emergencies, often a huge task given the scale of disasters such as the typhoon that struck the Philippines last year and given the importance of the EU in the global emergency-response system. The EU is the world’s largest donor.

The Commission’s role in civil protection within Europe is more limited. It comes to the fore in European crises when a member state asks others states for support, but the crises that have hit Europe in recent years – such as forest fires – have been limited geographically and in the number of countries affected.

It is unclear as yet how, as the EU’s Ebola co-ordinator, Stylianides would be expected to interact with national authorities across the EU. In addition to screening travellers at borders, the focus of member states’ attention is now on using visa information systems and transport carriers’ information to assess risks.

The EU’s response to Ebola is also likely to involve the European commissioners for health and migration. The health post will, from 1 November, be held by Vytenis Andriukaitis, a Lithuanian, while the migration commissioner will be a Greek, Dimitris Avramopoulos.

Even before the announcement by EU leaders of Stylianides’s new role, Stylianides had been expected in his five years as European commissioner to try to increase co-operation between the EU member states’ civil-protection agencies to avoid duplication and to make responses to crises more comprehensive. His efforts would be partly based on an ongoing attempt by EU member states and the Commission to identify gaps in national crisis-response systems.