ORPHANED BY EBOLA..........

Two children sit outside a hospital in Kenema, the third largest city in Sierra Leone, digging into a bowl of food and sharing plastic bags of clean water.

They have both been orphaned during the Ebola outbreak that has gripped West Africa and put the rest of the planet in a state of constant vigilance and fear.

The death toll in the outbreak is now at 4,546, around half of the known cases in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to the latest figures from the UN World Health Organization.

Now, the WHO is scaling up efforts to reach 600,000 people that have been affected by the health crisis in the area, that has seen hundreds of children orphaned and many families left without a breadwinner.

The latest death toll was released as the news came that Nigeria has been declared free from Ebola after passing the six week mark with no new cases.

'This is a spectacular success story,' Rui Gama Vaz from the WHO told a news conference in the capital Abuja, where officials broke into applause when he announced that Nigeria had shaken off the disease.

'It shows that Ebola can be contained, but we must be clear that we have only won a battle, the war will only end when West Africa is also declared free of Ebola.'

This year's outbreak of the highly infectious haemorrhagic fever thought to have originated in forest bats is the worst on record.

It was imported to Nigeria when Liberian-American diplomat Patrick Sawyer collapsed at the main international airport in Lagos on July 20.

Airport staff were unprepared and the government had not set up any hospital isolation unit, so he was able to infect several people, including health workers in the hospital where he was taken, some of whom had to restrain him to keep him there.

Lagos, the commercial hub of Africa's most populous nation, largest economy and leading energy producer, would have been an ideal springboard for Ebola to spread across the country.

'Nigeria was not really prepared for the outbreak, but the swift response from the federal government, state governments (and) international organisations was essential,' said Samuel Matoka, Ebola operations manager in Nigeria for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

'If a country like Nigeria, hampered by serious security problems, can do this ... any country in the world experiencing an imported case can hold onward transmission to just a handful of cases,' WHO Director Margaret Chan said in a statement.

For the three impoverished countries at the epicentre of the crisis, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, it is a different matter. According to consultancy DaMina Advisors, Nigeria has one doctor per 2,879 people compared with one per 86,275 in Liberia.

Yesterday, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said Ebola has killed more than 2,000 people in her country and has brought it to 'a standstill', noting that Liberia and two other badly hit countries were already weakened by years of war.

Appealing for more international help, Sirleaf described the devastating effects of Ebola in a 'Letter to the World' that was broadcast Sunday by the BBC.

'Across West Africa, a generation of young people risk being lost to an economic catastrophe as harvests are missed, markets are shut and borders are closed,' the Nobel Peace Prize laureate said.

'The virus has been able to spread so rapidly because of the insufficient strength of the emergency, medical and military services that remain under-resourced.' 

'There is no coincidence Ebola has taken hold in three fragile states - Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea - all battling to overcome the effects of interconnected wars,' she said adding that Liberia once had 3,000 medical doctors but by the end of its civil war in 2003, the country had just 36.

DailyMail