World

MONROVIA, Liberia — Liberian officials fear Ebola could soon spread through the capital's largest slum after residents raided a quarantine centre for suspected patients, and took items including blood-stained sheets and mattresses.

The violence in the West Point slum occurred late Saturday and was led by residents angry that patients were brought from other parts of the capital to the holding centre, Tolbert Nyenswah, assistant health minister, said Sunday. It was not immediately clear how many patients had been at the centre.

West Point residents went on a "looting spree", stealing items from the clinic that were likely infected, said a senior police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to brief the press. The residents took medical equipment, and mattresses and sheets that had bloodstains, he said.

"All between the houses you could see people fleeing with items looted from the patients," the official said, adding that he now feared "the whole of West Point will be infected”.

Some of the looted items were visibly stained with blood, vomit and excrement, said Richard Kieh, who lives in the area.

The incident raises fears of new infections in Liberia, which was already struggling to contain the outbreak.

Liberian police restored order to the West Point neighborhood. Sitting on land between the Montserrado River and the Atlantic Ocean, West Point is home to at least 50,000 people, according to a 2012 survey produced by groups including the Liberia Peacebuilding Office and the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission.

Distrust of government runs high, with rumors regularly circulating that officials plan to clear the slum out entirely.

Though there had been talk of putting West Point under quarantine should Ebola break out there, assistant health minister Nyenswah said Sunday no such step had been taken. "West Point is not yet quarantined as being reported," he said.

Ebola has killed 1,145 people in West Africa, including 413 in Liberia, according to the World Health Organisation.

In East Africa, the Kenyan government took steps to prevent the disease from spreading. Kenya will bar passengers traveling from three West African countries hit by the Ebola outbreak, closing a debate in East Africa's economic powerhouse about whether the national airline was exposing the country to the deadly disease.

The suspension is effective midnight Tuesday for all ports of entry for people traveling from or through Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, said Kenya's Health Ministry. Nigeria was not included in the ban, which also allows entry to health professionals and Kenyans returning from those countries.

"This step is in line with the recognition of the extraordinary measures urgently required to contain the Ebola outbreak in West Africa," the Health Ministry said. It cited the World Health Organisation's recent statement that the magnitude of the Ebola outbreak has been underestimated.

Following the government's announcement Saturday, Kenya Airways said it would suspend flights to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Kenya Airways, a major transport provider in Africa, had wrestled with the decision whether to continue flying to West Africa during the Ebola outbreak. Its suspension of flights is an abrupt reversal of its announcement Friday that it would continue flying.

Social commentators, medical experts and Kenyan politicians said they feared the airline was putting profits ahead of prudence, and that KQ, as the airline is known, would spread Ebola. The airline flies more than 70 flights a week to West Africa.

Several airlines have already suspended flights to Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, including British Airways, Emirates Airlines, Arik Air and ASKY Airlines. Nigeria became the fourth Ebola-affected country late last month after a Liberian-American man sick with the disease flew to Lagos on an ASKY flight and infected several people before he died.

Officials in Cameroon, which borders Nigeria, announced Friday it would suspend all flights from all four Ebola-affected countries. Korean Air announced on Thursday it would temporarily halt its service to Kenya despite the fact there are no cases of Ebola in the country.

GENEVA — The Ebola epidemic is moving faster than the authorities can handle and could take six months to bring under control, the medical charity MSF said Friday.

The warning came a day after the World Health Organisation said the scale of the epidemic had been vastly underestimated and that “extraordinary measures” were needed to contain the killer disease.

New figures released by the UN health agency showed the death toll from the worst outbreak of Ebola in four decades had climbed to 1,145 in the four afflicted West African countries — Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

“It is deteriorating faster and moving faster, than we can respond to,” Joanne Liu, the chief of Doctors without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, told reporters in Geneva.

She added that it could take six months to get the upper hand.

“It is like wartime,” she said a day after returning from the region. “I don’t think we should focus on numbers. To really get a reality check, we’re not talking in terms of weeks, but months to control the epidemic.”

Elhadj As Sy, the new head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, painted a similarly bleak picture, speaking of a “fear factor” in affected countries that was hampering medical assistance.

Also recently returned from the region, As Sy said he agreed with MSF’s six-month timeline for bringing the outbreak under control.

The WHO said Thursday it was coordinating “a massive scaling up of the international response” to the epidemic.

“Staff at the outbreak sites see evidence that the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak,” it said.

There were signs too that affected countries were stepping up their efforts to contain the virus.

Sierra Leone’s President Ernest Koroma announced plans on Friday for the construction of several more Ebola treatment centres, while urging the international community to “act quickly” in the fight against Ebola.

The four new centres would be built by the Red Cross and MSF, he said.

Experimental drugs 

The epidemic erupted in the forested zone straddling the borders of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia earlier this year, and later spread to Nigeria.

Liu said while Guinea was the initial epicentre of the disease, the pace there has slowed, with fears now focused on the other countries.

“If we don’t stabilise Liberia, we’ll never stabilise the region,” she said.

The last days of an Ebola victim can be grim, characterised by agonising muscular pain, vomiting, diarrhoea and catastrophic haemorrhaging described as “bleeding out” as vital organs break down.

No cure or vaccine is currently available for Ebola, with the WHO authorising the use of largely untested treatments in efforts to combat the disease.

Hard-hit nations are awaiting consignments of up to 1,000 doses of the barely tested drug ZMapp from the United States, which has raised hopes of saving hundreds.

Canada says between 800 and 1,000 doses of a vaccine called VSV-EBOV, which has shown promise in animal research but never been tested on humans, would also be distributed through the WHO.

But MSF’s Liu warned against focusing on drugs.

“In the short term, they’re not going to help that much, because we don’t have many drugs available. We need to a get a reality check on how this could impact the curve of the epidemic,” she said.

Sierra Leone’s chief medical officer Brima Kargbo this week spoke of the risks facing health workers fighting the epidemic, which has killed 32 nurses since May as well as an eminent doctor.

“We still have to break the chain of transmission to separate the infected from the uninfected,” Kargbo said.

Economic toll 

The cost of tackling the virus is also threatening to take a severe toll on the economies of already impoverished West African nations hit by the epidemic.

In Nigeria, in particular, a more serious outbreak could severely disrupt its oil and gas industry if international companies are forced to evacuate staff and shut operations, rating agency Moody’s has warned.

Nigerian sex workers also reported suspicion from customers, with business down drastically. One woman in Lagos who gave her name as Bright told AFP that Ebola was “worse than HIV/AIDS. You can prevent HIV by using condoms but you can’t do the same with Ebola”.

Across the region, draconian travel restrictions have been imposed, and a number of airlines have cancelled flights in and out of West Africa.

Guinea, where at least 380 people have died, became the latest country to declare a health emergency, ordering strict controls at border points and a ban on moving bodies from one town to another.

As countries around the world stepped up measures to contain the disease, the International Olympics Committee said athletes from Ebola-hit countries had been barred from competing in pool events and combat sports at the Youth Olympics opening in China on Saturday.

KAMENSK-SHAKHTINSKY, Russia — Diplomatic efforts to douse an international firestorm over claims that Ukraine’s forces destroyed Russian military vehicles ratcheted up Saturday as Moscow demanded that Kiev allow its mammoth aid convoy to cross the volatile border.

Moscow and Kiev’s foreign ministers prepared for an urgent meeting with their French and German counterparts Sunday after the United States blasted Russia for its “extremely dangerous” escalation of the crisis in Ukraine.

French President Francois Hollande meanwhile urged Ukraine to show “restraint and good judgement” as it pushed on with a brutal offensive to oust insurgents after four months of fighting that has killed over 2,000 people, and left the region facing a humanitarian disaster.

The latest spike in tensions came after Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko claimed his troops had blown up part of a small Russian military convoy that British media spotted breaching the porous frontier on Thursday.

Russia dismissed the claims as “fantasies”, its latest denial of persistent allegations from the West that it is arming the rebels.

Aid ‘still waiting’ 

Amid the international slanging match, some 280 trucks packed with what Russia claims is humanitarian aid waited for a third day some 30 kilometres  from a rebel-held border post as Moscow and Kiev haggled over letting it across.

The West and Kiev fear the convoy could be a “Trojan horse” to bolster the flagging pro-Kremlin rebellion in eastern Ukraine or provide Moscow with an excuse to send in the 20,000 troops that NATO says it has amassed on the border.

Russia’s foreign ministry has repeatedly demanded in recent days that Kiev cease fire in order for the aid to reach residents of blighted cities in the east who have been stuck for days without water or power.

AFP correspondents at the border heard blasts from the Ukrainian side and saw Moscow’s military hardware rumble along Russian territory close to the frontier.

Ukraine says it has sent scores of border officials to the Russian side to scour aid cargo but insists they are waiting for permission from the Red Cross to start work.

A spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross — which is meant to be overseeing the operation — told AFP that so far no inspections have started as negotiations continue.

“There was a meeting this morning between the Ukrainians and the Russians. We did not participate,” said Galina Balzamova. “We are still waiting for agreement” between them, she added. 

While Russia has denied all claims it is funnelling weapons to the rebels, a top separatist leader claimed that reinforcements trained across the border had arrived to prop up the ailing insurgency.

A fresh injection of firepower consisted of 150 pieces of hardware and 1,200 personnel “who have received four months of training on Russian territory”, Alexander Zakharchenko, prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, said in a video posted on a rebel website.

“They have been brought in at the most crucial moment,” he said.

In Donetsk, the largest rebel bastion, the rumble of shelling could be heard Saturday as government troops tightened the vice around separatist fighters holed up there.

AFP journalists found several houses aflame in Makiyivka, a city adjoining Donetsk, and saw large craters around a residential neighbourhood near a base of rebel special forces.

Human Rights Watch quoted residents fleeing Lugansk — the rebels second largest stronghold that has seen some of the worst fighting — as saying that the city was cut off from electricity, gas and cell phone coverage, and that it was difficult to find drinking water and food.

The United Nations says over 285,000 people have fled the fighting in the east.

Ukraine’s security spokesman Andriy Lysenko said Saturday that three soldiers died and 13 were wounded in the past 24 hours.

CONAKRY — Guinea has declared a public health emergency over an Ebola epidemic that has killed more than 1,000 people in three West African states and is sending health workers to all affected border points, a government official said.

An estimated 377 people have died in Guinea since the world’s worst outbreak of Ebola began in March in remote parts of a border region next to Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Guinea says its outbreak is under control with the numbers of new cases falling, but that the new measures are needed to prevent further infection from the other countries at the centre of the epidemic.

“Trucks full of health materials and carrying health personnel are going to all the border points with Liberia and Sierra Leone,” Aboubacar Sidiki Diakité, president of Guinea’s Ebola commission, said late on Wednesday.

As many as 3,000 people are waiting at 17 border points for a green light to enter the country, he said.

“Any who are sick will be immediately isolated. People will be followed up on. We can’t take the risk of letting everyone through without checks,” he said.

Sierra Leone has declared Ebola a national emergency as has Liberia, which is hoping that two of its doctors diagnosed with Ebola can start treatment on Thursday with some of the limited supply of experimental drug ZMapp.

Canada’s Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp. is also exploring the possibility of making more of its experimental Ebola treatment, Chief Executive Officer Mark Murray said.

Nigeria, which has also declared a national emergency, on Thursday said it had 11 cases of Ebola after a doctor who treated a Liberian man who brought the disease to Lagos fell ill.

Health experts say the responses of governments to the contagious haemorrhagic disease need to be calibrated to prevent its spread while avoiding measures that could induce panic or damage economies unnecessarily.

The task is made more difficult because the capacity of health services in the three main countries has been stretched to breaking point and mistrust of health workers among some rural communities is high.

In addition, 170 healthcare workers have been infected with Ebola and at least 81 have died among the overall toll of 1,069 people dead, according to the World Health Organisation. Three of the dead are in Nigeria.

One of the deadliest diseases known to man, Ebola kills the majority of those infected. Its symptoms include internal and external bleeding, diarrhoea and vomiting.

Ebola also threatens significant economic ramifications for some West African states as disruption to commerce, transport and borders lasts at least another month, said Matt Robinson, a vice president at Moody’s ratings agency.

Sierra Leone’s economic growth would slow from the 16 per cent rate recorded in 2013 if mining sector production is affected, he said, adding a significant increase in expenditure on health in the three main countries is likely.

There is also “an indirect effect arising from an Ebola-induced economic slowdown on government revenue generation in a region where budgets are already hindered by low tax collection,” he said.

Among the signs of the regional economic impact, Ivory Coast will not allow any ships from Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia to enter its port at Abidjan, according to a port statement.

“Anybody presenting symptoms similar to Ebola on board a ship must be made known to port authorities,” it said.

Fewer passengers are arriving at Ivory Coast’s main airport from Freetown, Conakry and Monrovia because of the virus leading to a shortfall of about 4,000 passengers a month, Abdoulaye Coulibaly, chairman of Air Cote d’Ivoire, told Reuters.

Ivory Coast and its eastern neighbour Ghana have recorded no cases of Ebola. Ghana’s government said it would step up its funding for preventative health and ban the holding of international conferences for three months as a precaution.

Further afield, Korean Air Lines Co. Ltd. said it will suspend flights to and from Nairobi, Kenya, from August 20 to prevent the spread of the virus.

Malaysian firm Sime Darby said it has relocated expatriate workers at its Liberian oil palm plantation and limited employee movement because of the outbreak.

“The company’s routine estate operations are continuing under the supervision of local managers. However, tasks that require technical knowledge of expatriates such as mill construction and planting, have been affected,” a spokesman said.

DONETSK, Ukraine — Artillery shells hit close to the centre of Ukraine’s separatist-held city of Donetsk for the first time on Thursday, killing at least one person, as a large Russian aid convoy rumbled towards the border.

With Ukrainian government forces tightening the noose on pro-Russian separatists, shelling rocked Donetsk, sending frightened residents rushing for cover, witnesses said.

It was not immediately clear if the artillery was fired by government or rebel forces.

Two shells landed 200 metres  from the Park Inn Radisson, one of the city’s main hotels, shattering windows. The blasts opened up a yawning hole on the third floor of an apartment block and left a broad crater on the pavement.

Nearby, a body covered by a sheet lay stretched out on the blood-stained ground.

A huge Russian convoy carrying 2,000 tonnes of water, baby food and other humanitarian aid drove through southern Russia towards the frontier, while Kiev repeated it could not enter until Ukrainian authorities had cleared its cargo.

The pro-Western Kiev government says the humanitarian crisis is partly of Moscow’s making and has denounced the dispatch of aid as an act of cynicism. It is also fearful that the operation could become a covert military intervention by Moscow to prop up the rebels who appear on the verge of defeat.

Moscow, which denies charges — also voiced by the West — of giving the rebels heavy weapons, has dismissed as “absurd” suggestions it could use the convoy as a cover for invasion.

By Thursday evening, the convoy had stopped near Kamensk-Shakhtinsky and one of the drivers told Reuters it would be heading to the crossing point at Izvarine, which is held by the Ukrainian rebels.

If this were the case, Ukrainian border guards and customs officers would be unable to conduct proper formalities and make the checks they say are needed on the cargo.

“The cargo will all the same have to be looked at by Ukrainian border guards and transferred to representatives of the Red Cross,” said military spokesman Andriy Lysenko on Thursday. It was not immediately clear how this could happen.

The caravan of 280 trucks left the Moscow region on Tuesday, looking to take aid to Luhansk region, in eastern Ukraine, where the main city is held by the separatists.

Even if the convoy was to enter Ukraine via Izvarine, it would not be able to get to Luhansk city without encountering government troops at Novosvitlivka, a settlement which Kiev forces took only on Thursday.

“Ukrainian forces have closed the last possibility for road communications between Luhansk and other territories which are controlled by Russian mercenaries in particular Izvarine,” Lysenko said.

Relief agencies say people living in Luhansk and in Donetsk, the region’s main industrial hub, are facing shortages of water, food and electricity after four-months of conflict in which the United Nations say more than 2,000 people have been killed.

Ukrainian troops have been slowly encircling Donetsk, which had a peace-time population of nearly a million.

Lysenko said a further nine Ukrainian servicemen had been killed in the past 24 hours up to Thursday afternoon. Regional health authorities said 15 people were killed by a shell which hit a public transport depot at Zurges, east of Donetsk, on Wednesday. The dead included three children.

In Donetsk on Thursday, people poured out of their offices into the stairwell of the city’s main administration building after loud explosions nearby triggered an evacuation warning.

A short while later, the whistling sound of incoming shells were swiftly followed by at least two further blasts.

Liliya Chalina, 54, lived in the apartment block whose wall was smashed by a projectile. “It came straight into the apartment. Thank God I was not in the kitchen,” she said.

“My husband promised me that shells would never hit our house, only large buildings. But look at what has happened.”

A woman called Tamara, who showed a deputy’s card for the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, said she believed the separatist fighters had fired the shells. “One of the fighters said they had done it,” she said.

A further round of artillery fire hit central Donetsk later in the afternoon. A Reuters witness heard around 10 explosions and saw a residential building and a garage in flames and a row of small shops which had been destroyed by the blasts.

A separatist spokesman said some people had been killed, but was not able to give exact numbers.

DAKAR, Senegal — Doctors treating a leading Sierra Leone physician who became sick with Ebola considered giving him an experimental drug but feared it could trigger a dangerous immune response and did not administer it, Doctors Without Borders said Wednesday.

The revelation came the same day that another top doctor from Sierra Leone died of the disease, fuelling a debate about how to apportion a limited supply of untested drugs and vaccines and whether they are even effective. Modupeh Cole was one of the top doctors working in the Ebola isolation ward in Connaught Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital.

Ebola has killed more than 1,000 people and sickened nearly 2,000 in the current West African outbreak that has also hit Guinea, Liberia and Nigeria. Many of the dead are health workers, who are often working with inadequate supplies and protection.

At the time the experimental treatment was being considered for Dr Sheik Humarr Khan, his immune system was already starting to produce antibodies suggesting he might recover, Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French acronym, MSF, said in a statement Wednesday. Khan was also due to be transferred to a European hospital that would be more capable of handling any side effects that might arise with the experimental drug, it said.

In the end, the treating physicians decided against using the drug. They never told Khan of its existence because they felt it would be unethical to tell him of a treatment they might not use. Shortly after their decision, however, Khan’s condition worsened, the statement said, and the company providing the medical evacuation decided not to transfer him. He died a few days later, on July 29.

“Every day, doctors have to make choices, sometimes difficult, about treatment for their patients,” said the Doctors Without Borders statement. “Trying an untested drug on patients is a very difficult decision, particularly in the light of the ‘do no harm’ principle.”

The statement did not specify what drug was considered. But it is believed to be ZMapp, an experimental drug that has since been given to two Americans and a Spaniard.

The California-based company that makes the drug, Mapp Pharmaceuticals, has said that its supplies are now exhausted, and it will take months to make even a modest amount.

The drug has never been tested in humans, and it is not clear if it is effective or even harmful. The Americans are improving — although it is unclear what role ZMapp has played in that — but the Spaniard died Tuesday.

The last known doses of ZMapp were arriving Wednesday in Liberia, where the government has said they will be given to two doctors. They would be the first Africans known to receive the treatment.

But the debate over experimental treatments and vaccines will continue. Canada has promised to donate 800 to 1,000 doses of its untested Ebola vaccine to the World Health Organisation and already questions are being asked about who will get it and how scientists will determine if it works.

Dr Gregory Taylor, deputy head of the Public Health Agency of Canada, which developed the vaccines, said it makes the most sense to give the vaccine to healthcare workers in Africa who are among the most vulnerable because of their close contact with Ebola patients.

Guinea is considering asking for access to the vaccine, according to Communications Minister Al Houssein Makanera Kake.

Unlike ZMapp, which is being given to only a handful of people and is unlikely to yield significant information about the drug’s effectiveness, the vaccine could be tested in a small, but more rigorous field trial.

“It gives us an opportunity to test the vaccine in an outbreak situation in populations that are at risk,” said David Heymann, who headed the WHO’s response to SARS and is now professor at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “However, the study design will be very difficult because you have to make sure the health workers don’t lapse in their infection control, and then you can’t ever be sure it was the vaccine that protected them.”

KIEV/VORONEZH, Russia — Ukraine described Russia’s dispatch of an aid convoy advancing now towards its border as a cynical act designed to fan a pro-Russian rebellion the UN said on Wednesday had claimed nearly 1,000 lives, fighters and civilians, in two weeks.

Kiev declared that the convoy would not be allowed to pass; but a presidential spokesman later suggested a compromise might be found, bringing it under the control of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

“First they send tanks, Grad missiles and bandits who fire on Ukrainians and then they send water and salt,” Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said of a conflict that has killed over 2,000 since mid-April.

“The level of Russian cynicism knows no bounds.”

The comments reflected suspicions in Kiev and Western capitals that passage of the convoy onto Ukrainian soil could turn into a covert military action to help separatists in the Russian-speaking east now losing ground to government forces.

Russia, which sees Russian-speakers in the east under threat from a government it considers chauvinistic, said any suggestion of a link between the convoy and an invasion plan was absurd.

The convoy of heavy trucks rumbled out of Moscow region on Tuesday and travelled some 500km to the southwestern Russian town of Voronezh. There it stopped at an air base behind high fences, according to a Reuters reporter.

Several people who entered the air base and spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity said dozens of trucks were still parked at the air base. It was not clear whether the Voronezh convoy was the only one travelling towards Ukraine.

“The journey isn’t short, of course,” one lorry driver interviewed on Russian Rossiya-24 television commented.

“How can I put it? It’s pretty difficult. But how could we not help our Slavic brothers? We are all for it.”

An ICRC spokeswoman in Geneva said Russia had given a “general list” of goods on its convoy to Ukrainian authorities and the ICRC, but the aid agency needed a detailed inventory.

“A number of important issues still need to be clarified between the two sides, including border crossing procedures, customs clearance and other issues,” Anastasia Isyuk said.

The list of contents on the 260-truck convoy provided by Moscow included food, water bottles and generators, she said.

Dilemma

The last few weeks has seen signficant government successes against rebels who have abandoned a string of towns under heavy fire. Kiev says rebel leaders, some of whom are Russians and who seek union with Russia, are receiving arms from Moscow, something the Kremlin denies.

UN human rights spokeswoman Cecile Pouilly said the estimated death toll had risen to 2,086 as of August 10 from 1,129 on July 26. The figures included Ukrainian soldiers, rebel groups and civilians, but were “very conservative estimates”.

“This corresponds to a clear escalating trend,” she told Reuters in response to an inquiry.

It was not clear to what extent the figures reflected escalation of the fighting, which erupted four months ago after a pro-Russian president was driven from office by protests, or delays in gathering data from government and local agencies.

State-controlled Russian television presented a picture of fierce battles around the rebel stronghold of Donetsk, accusing the Ukrainian military of indiscriminate shelling or rocketing of civilian buildings. Residents interviewed said they were being bombed everyday and hiding in cellars.

The approach of the convoy presents Kiev with a dilemma.

Ukraine says it fears it could become the focus of tension and conflict once on its soil and provide pretext for a Russian armed incursion. At the same time, Kiev does not want to seem to be blocking aid and providing a moral basis for Kremlin action.

Border crossing

A presidential spokesman said that the Ukrainians, at a meeting late on Tuesday night, had agreed to accept the aid for Luhansk region in a bid to prevent “a full-scale invasion” by Russia.

One option he said was for the aid to come into Ukraine at a point further along the border closer to Luhansk itself after checks by Ukrainian border guards, customs and officials of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

The aid could then be distributed under the supervision of the Red Cross, said the spokesman, Svyatoslav Tseholko.

Kiev accuses Russia of supporting and arming the rebels — who now appear to be on the verge of defeat by government forces — with tanks, missiles and other weapons. Moscow denies this.

Four months of fighting in the east has produced a humanitarian crisis in parts of eastern Ukraine. People in the main cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, on the border with Russia, are suffering acute shortages of water, food and electricity.

Yatseniuk said the Kiev government had received $6 million from its Western partners which would be used to alleviate conditions in distressed areas.

GENEVA — The World Health Organisation authorised the use of experimental drugs in the fight against Ebola on Tuesday as the death toll topped 1,000 and a Spanish priest became the first European to succumb to the latest outbreak of the virus.

The declaration by the UN’s health agency came after a US company that makes an experimental serum said it had sent all its available supplies to hard-hit west Africa.

“In the particular circumstances of this outbreak, and provided certain conditions are met... it is ethical to offer unproven interventions with as yet unknown efficacy and adverse effects,” the WHO said in a statement following a teleconference between medical experts.

The current outbreak, described as the worst since Ebola was first discovered four decades ago, has now killed 1,013 people since early this year, the WHO said.

Cases have so far been limited to Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, all in west Africa where ill-equipped and fragile health systems are struggling to cope.

Elderly Spanish priest Miguel Pajares, who became infected while helping patients in Liberia died in a Madrid hospital on Tuesday, five days after being evacuated.

Monrovia said it had requested samples of an experimental drug, ZMapp, that has shown some positive effects on two US aid workers but failed to save the Spanish priest.

Supplies would be brought in by a representative of the US government later this week, the Liberian government said.

There is currently no available cure or vaccine for Ebola, which the WHO has declared a global public health emergency, and the use of experimental drugs has stoked an ethical debate.

Early phase 

Despite promising results for the ZMapp treatment, made by private US company Mapp Biopharmaceutical, it is still in an early phase of development and had only been tested previously on monkeys.

ZMapp is in very short supply, but its use on the Western aid workers evacuated to the United States last week triggered controversy and demands that it be made available in Africa.

Mapp said it had sent all its available supplies to West Africa.

“In responding to the request received this weekend from a West African nation, the available supply of ZMapp is exhausted,” it said in a statement.

“Any decision to use ZMapp must be made by the patients’ medical team,” it said, adding that the drug was “provided at no cost in all cases”.

The company did not reveal which nation received the doses, or how many were sent.

But the Liberian presidency said: “The White House and the United States Food and Drug Administration have approved the request for sample doses of experimental serum to treat Liberian doctors who are currently infected with the deadly Ebola virus disease.”

Price hikes and 

food shortages 

Panic is stalking the impoverished countries ravaged by the disease in west Africa, where drastic containment measures are causing transport chaos, price hikes and food shortages, and stoking fears that people could die of hunger.

Numerous countries around the globe have imposed emergency measures, including flight bans and improved health screenings.

In Liberia — where Ebola has already claimed almost 370 lives — a third province was placed under quarantine on Monday.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf also banned state officials from travelling abroad for a month and ordered those outside the country to return home within a week.

Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone account for the bulk of the cases, but Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, has also counted two deaths.

And Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma expressed his “utter dismay” at the “slow pace” of the international community in responding to the outbreak, during a hospital visit on Monday.

Eight Chinese medical workers who treated patients with Ebola have been placed in quarantine in Sierra Leone, Beijing’s ambassador said Monday, but would not be drawn on whether they were displaying symptoms of the disease.

In addition, 24 nurses have been quarantined, health officials said, while a senior physician had contracted Ebola but was responding well to treatment.

The nation’s sole virologist, who was at the forefront of its battle against the epidemic, died from Ebola last month.

As countries around the world were on alert, Japan said it was evacuating two dozen staff from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The Ivory Coast announced on Monday it was banning all flights from the three nations and said it had turned back around 100 Liberians trying to flee across the border.

Niger, which also has yet to confirm any cases, has put in place an “emergency plan” to train health workers and boost checks at borders, airports and stations.

Togo has also strengthened health screenings.

In Senegal, a newspaper editor was detained by police for spreading “false information” after his paper claimed there were five Ebola cases in the country, which authorities have denied.

MOSCOW — Ukraine set terms Tuesday for allowing in Russian aid after Moscow sent a 280-truck convoy to the conflict-torn east and fueled fears the mission could be used to aid rebels.

The authorities in Kiev said they would stop the Russian lorries at the border but allow the aid to be unloaded and shipped into eastern Ukraine with the help of the Red Cross.

“We will not allow [the aid] to be accompanied by the Russian ministry for emergency situations or by Russian troops,” said Valeriy Chalyy, deputy head of the presidential administration.

Russia has stepped up calls for a humanitarian mission to the east where Ukrainian troops have tightened their grip following four months of fierce battles with pro-Moscow rebels that have left cities without power, running water or fuel.

There are also food shortages.

A convoy of 280 lorries left Moscow Tuesday for eastern Ukraine carrying 2,000 tonnes of “humanitarian supplies”, including medical equipment, baby food and sleeping bags, Russian media reported.

Sources told Russian news agencies the convoy would arrive at the border on Wednesday.

‘Catastrophic consequences’ 

President Vladimir Putin announced late Monday that Moscow was sending a humanitarian mission to deal with the “catastrophic consequences” of Kiev’s offensive against insurgents.

Moscow insisted it was working in collaboration with the International Committee of the Red Cross and that the convoy would not include military personnel.

But the international aid agency said Tuesday there was still no agreement on the issue and France insisted such convoys should not be allowed to cross the border unless they met strict conditions, including Red Cross approval.

As rebel strongholds warn of a looming humanitarian disaster in the east, Kiev has said it will only accept aid as part of a broader international mission involving Europe and the US under the supervision of the Red Cross.

The United States and other western powers accuse Moscow of fanning the insurgency by supplying arms to the rebels.

And at a time when Ukrainian forces are gaining ground against the rebels, they have also warned Russia against sending troops into Ukraine in the guise of a humanitarian mission.

NATO says Moscow has massed 20,000 troops along the Ukrainian border, while Kiev has put the number at 45,000.

Moscow however has denied the allegations.

As fierce fighting continued in the industrial east, Ukraine’s military said six servicemen had been killed and 31 were wounded in the past 24 hours.

Seven civilians were also injured in shelling overnight in the besieged main insurgent bastion of Donetsk, local authorities said, while Ukraine’s military said it was ready to surround the rebels’ second city of Lugansk.

Kiev’s forces hope to cut off rebel access to the porous Russian border, from where Ukraine believes the separatists are getting their weapons.

‘Fait accompli’ fears 

Over 1,300 people have been killed in four months of what the Red Cross has already deemed a civil war, while 285,000 have fled their homes, according to the United Nations.

Heavily shelled rebel-held cities say they have been without power, running water or fuel for days, while medicine and food supplies are also running low.

With the mammoth convoy under way on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius warned that it “could be a cover by the Russians to set themselves up near Donetsk and Lugansk, and declare a fait accompli”.

He added that the aid mission would be “only justifiable if the Red Cross gives its consent, if there are no military forces around [the mission], if there are not just Russians but other countries and if Ukraine agrees”.

“At this precise moment, this is not the case,” he said.

French President Francois Hollande also voiced “grave concerns” about a possible unilateral Russian mission into Ukraine.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) confirmed that no green light had been given for an aid mission.

“We still need to get some more information before we can move ahead,” ICRC spokeswoman Anastasia Isyuk said in Geneva.

Former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma meanwhile told Interfax Ukraine news agency that Moscow, Kiev and the European security monitor OSCE agreed that aid should head for Lugansk through the government-held Kharkiv region.

He said OSCE monitors would accompany the convoy, but the organisation told AFP that they were still in talks to detail their involvement in an aid mission.

ANKARA — Turkey’s ruling party begins deliberations on the shape of the next government on Monday after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan secured his place in history by winning the nation’s first direct presidential election.

Erdogan’s victory in Sunday’s vote takes him a step closer to the executive presidency he has long coveted for Turkey. But it is an outcome which his opponents fear will herald an increasingly authoritarian rule.

In the coming weeks, Erdogan will for the last time chair meetings of the ruling AK Party he founded and oversee the selection of a new party leader, likely to be a staunch loyalist and his future prime minister.

He will be inaugurated on August 28.

“Today is a new day, a milestone for Turkey, the birthday of Turkey, of its rebirth from the ashes,” Erdogan, 60, told thousands of supporters in a victory speech from the balcony of the AK Party headquarters in Ankara late on Sunday.

Supporters honking car horns and waving flags took to the streets in Ankara after results on Turkish television said Erdogan, the prime minister for more than a decade, had won 52 per cent of the vote.

The celebratory mood filled the front pages of pro-government newspapers.

“The People’s Revolution”, said a banner headline in the Aksam daily above a picture of Erdogan waving to the crowds overnight. Other headlines spelled out: “Erdogan’s historic triumph”, “The People’s President”.

Investors initially welcomed the result on hopes that it would ensure political stability, after nearly 12 years of AK Party rule. The lira rallied to 2.1385 against the dollar from 2.1601 late on Friday.

However, some said the market reaction could be short-lived.

“We expect the market will refocus on the composition of the Cabinet,” said Phoenix Kalen, a London-based strategist at Societe Generale, warning there could be “investor concern over the future trajectory of economic policy making”.

It was a narrower margin of victory than polls had suggested but still 13 points more than Erdogan’s closest rival, and comfortable enough to avoid the need for a second round runoff.

The chairman of the high election board confirmed Erdogan had a majority, with more than 99 per cent of votes counted, and said full provisional figures would be released later on Monday.

Erdogan has vowed to exercise the full powers granted to the presidency under current laws, unlike predecessors who played a mainly ceremonial role. But he has made no secret of his plans to change the constitution and forge an executive presidency.

“I want to underline that I will be the president of all 77 million people, not only those who voted for me. I will be a president who works for the flag, for the country, for the people,” he said in his victory speech.

The electoral map suggested that might not be easy.

While the expanses of the conservative Anatolian heartlands voted overwhelmingly for Erdogan, the more liberal western Aegean and Mediterranean coastal fringe was dominated by main opposition candidate Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, and the southeastern corner by Kurdish candidate Selahattin Demirtas.

‘Coronation’

Turkey has emerged as a regional economic force under Erdogan, who has ridden a wave of religiously conservative support to transform the secular republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk on the ruins of the Ottoman empire in 1923.

But his critics warn that a President Erdogan, with his roots in political Islam and intolerance of dissent, would lead the NATO member and European Union candidate further away from Ataturk’s secular ideals.

Few investors had doubted the outcome.

“This was more of a coronation than an election, with the result preordained quite some time ago,” said Nicholas Spiro, managing director of London-based Spiro Sovereign Strategy.

But in the long term, there are concerns about concentration of power in the hands of a sometimes impulsive leader.

“Mr Erdogan continues to dominate Turkey’s political scene and is eager to turn the presidency into an executive, hands-on role. He called the shots as premier and he will keep calling the shots as president,” Spiro said.

“Turkey’s next premier will govern in Mr Erdogan’s shadow.”

Ihsanoglu, a former diplomat and academic who won 38.5 per cent of the vote according to broadcasters CNN Turk and NTV, congratulated Erdogan on the result in a brief statement.

Demirtas took 9.7 per cent, according to the TV stations — a result for an ethnic Kurd that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago as Turkey battled a Kurdish rebellion and sought to quell demands from the ethnic minority.

Political intrigue

It will be vital for Erdogan to have a loyal prime minister. Under the constitution, he will have to break with the AK Party before he is inaugurated in a little over two weeks’ time.

Should his influence over the party wane, Erdogan could struggle to force through the constitutional changes he wants to create an executive presidency, a reform which requires either a two-thirds majority in parliament or a popular vote.

“In a few days when the official results are announced, the prime minister’s relationship with the party and the parliament will be over,” Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc told reporters in Ankara late on Sunday.

“You will of course ask who will be prime minister and the leader of the party. Starting from tonight, I know that there will be work done on this front,” he said.

Senior AK officials say foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who has strong support within the party bureaucracy and has been Erdogan’s right-hand man internationally, is the top choice to succeed him, although former transport minister Binali Yildirim is also trying to position himself for the job.

Erdogan’s critics fear a supine prime minister will leave him too powerful, and erode the presidency’s traditional role as a check on the powers of the executive. His backers dismiss such concerns, arguing Turkey needs strong leadership.