UN launches mission to halt worldwide Ebola spread

MONROVIA, Oct 2 (AFP): The UN launched a mission on Thursday to prevent the worldwide spread of Ebola as the US hunted for people who came in contact with the first African diagnosed with the deadly virus outside the continent.
Anthony Banbury, the special representative for the UN Mission on Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER), was expected to set ambitious targets for action on the crisis as he began a tour of the three worst-hit nations in the Liberian capital Monrovia.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said she had told Banbury the virus had spread to all 15 counties of Liberia, the worst-hit nation with almost two-thirds of the 3,338 deaths in west Africa.
"Affected people are leaving from urban places and hiding out in remote communities," Sirleaf said, according to a statement from the presidency following the meeting on Wednesday.
"If we do not move in as quickly as possible, the virus (will) further spread in rural areas."
Banbury was due to address the media before moving on to Sierra Leone and then Guinea over the coming days, with US health officials scouring the Dallas area for people who came in contact with a Liberian man diagnosed with Ebola.
The man first sought treatment in Texas on September 25 but hospital officials have admitted he may have come into contact with many more people than first thought because an apparent miscommunication among staff resulted in his release back into the community for several days.
Ebola is spread through close contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, and can only be transmitted when a patient is showing symptoms like fever, aches, bleeding, vomiting or diarrhoea.
The man-the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola on US soil-flew from Liberia, the hardest-hit nation in west Africa's deadly Ebola outbreak, and arrived in Texas September 20 to visit family. He fell ill on September 24.
He went to the hospital the next day but was sent home because the medical team "felt clinically it was a low-grade common viral disease", said Mark Lester, executive vice president of Texas Health Resources.
BBC adds: A leading charity has warned that a rate of five new Ebola cases an hour in Sierra Leone means healthcare demands are far outstripping supply. Save the Children said there were 765 new cases of Ebola reported in the West African state last week, while there are only 327 beds in the country.
Experts and politicians are set to meet in London to debate a global response to the crisis.
It is the world's worst outbreak of the virus, killing 3,338 people so far.
There have been 7,178 confirmed cases, with Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea suffering the most.
Save the Children says Ebola is spreading across Sierra Leone at a "terrifying rate", with the number of new cases being recorded doubling every few weeks.
It said that even as health authorities got on top of the outbreak in one area, it spread to another.
The scale of the disease is also "massively unreported" according to the charity, because "untold numbers of children are dying anonymously at home or in the streets".