Sierra Leone authorities have imposed a two-week lockdown on the eastern diamond mining district of Kono after eight cases of Ebola were confirmed in one day.
According to Sierra Leone's health ministry, Tuesday's spate of Ebola reports increased the cumulative total of confirmed cases in the region to 119.
The lockdown on Wednesday will limit residents' movements until December 23.
Sierra Leone, along with Guinean and Liberia, is at the epicentre of the worst Ebola outbreak on record. The virus has claimed over 6300 lives in west Africa over the past year, including more than 1700 in Sierra Leone.
Officials from the World Health Organisation and US Center for Disease Control have been assisting Sierra Leone's National Ebola Response Center to prevent the virus from spreading throughout Kono and its population of 350,000.
"Our team met heroic doctors and nurses at their wits' end, exhausted burial teams and lab techs, all doing the best they could but they simply ran out of resources and were overrun with gravely ill people," said WHO's national Ebola co-ordinator, Olu Olushayo.
The decision to impose a lockdown was taken at a meeting of traditional rulers known as the Council of Paramount Chiefs, its chairman, Paul Saquee, said.
Although rapid reaction has helped contain the virus to about half of the 15 chiefdoms in Kono, WHO teams that arrived in the area 10 days ago were taken aback at the situation they encountered.
In the space of 11 days, two WHO teams buried 87 victims, including a nurse and an ambulance driver enlisted to help dispose of corpses piling up in the local hospital.
Most people were remaining indoors and while shops were open, the markets were largely empty of consumers.
Only essential vehicles such as fuel-carrying tankers, military, police, NGO workers and UN-associated vehicles were allowed through heavily monitored checkpoints into the district.
Private and commercial vehicles and motor cycle taxis are barred, and mining activity has ceased, one mines monitor reported.
GLOBAL DEATH TOLL AT 6346 OUT OF 17,834 CASES:
* Sierra Leone
397 new cases during the week of December 7 - three times as many as Liberia and Guinea combined. Now has a total of 7897 Ebola cases, including 1768 deaths
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* Liberia
As of December 3 7719 Ebola infections and 3177 deaths; 225 new cases during the three weeks leading up to December 3, and previously hard-hit district of Lofa reported no new cases for six consecutive weeks
* Guinea
2292 Ebola cases and 1428 deaths as of December 7. Guinea registered 321 new cases country-wide in the prior three weeks - 103 of them in the final week. WHO says transmission has been increasing slightly and expanding geographically.
* Other countries
Death toll remains the same - six in Mali, one in the US and eight in Nigeria, which was declared Ebola free in October.
