Liberia has announced a dramatic drop in new Ebola infections as Mali announced a second case with the death of a nurse.
Liberian assistant health minister Tolbert Nyenswah said new cases had dropped from a daily peak of more than 500 to around 50, confirming tentative announcements by experts worldwide of an apparent slowdown in the epidemic.
"It's not the number of Ebola cases we were reporting two months ago.... The numbers of cases are reducing," he said, adding however that there were still new cases emerging across the country.
The largest Ebola outbreak on record has killed about 5000 people, with Liberia hit hardest and the contagion still raging in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Guinea.
Mali recorded a new case with the death of a nurse who treated a patient from Guinea.
"The nurse, who had been in contact with a Guinean national who died of the illness, died in turn," said an official at the Pasteur Clinic in the capital Bamako, where the male nurse worked.
Tests had confirmed the presence of the Ebola virus, the official added.
The announcement of a second Ebola case late on Tuesday came as Malian authorities were beginning to lift quarantine restrictions on more than a hundred people put at risk by exposure to Mali's first victim of the deadly virus.
The victim, a two-year-old girl from Guinea, was diagnosed with Ebola after journeying to the western town of Kayes on October 23 and died the following day.
There was good news in the US too, where health officials said Craig Spencer, a 33-year-old New York doctor who became America's last known Ebola case, had been cured and released from hospital.
The US has treated nine victims of the virus, which spreads through contact with infected bodily fluids.
The White House has been at the forefront of the international response to the outbreak, committing hundreds of millions of dollars and announcing plans for Ebola treatment units across Liberia.
The first US-built centre opened on Monday in Tubmanburg, around 70 kilometres northwest of Monrovia.
Gorbee Logan, a health officer for the area, put the drop in cases down to efforts to raised awareness of Ebola within communities across the country and better investigation of outbreaks.
"A lot more case-finding, contact-tracing, case investigation and surveillance activities - all of these have helped," he said.
The claim chimes with the advice of global medical aid agency Doctors Without Borders, which has called for a more localised response focusing on the deployment of rapid response teams to new outbreaks.
The organisation launched an online training program on Tuesday aimed at helping aid workers involved in fighting the outbreak.
It said the training platform was "available to anyone wishing to gain a basic understanding of the virus and how it can be contained".
In Sierra Leone, WHO spokeswoman Winnie Romeril said the outbreak had stabilised in some areas but was "still skyrocketing" in the west of the country.
Kenema, the eastern city at the epicentre of the epidemic, has not recorded new cases for three weeks, but the capital Freetown and the nearby town of Hastings are still battling a serious outbreak, she said.
The official nationwide death toll of 1133 was a gross underestimate and the real caseload was likely five times the official figure, she said.
"It's not a cover-up by authorities, (it's) just people don't report their cases. This is a serious problem - they want to keep the bodies and organise traditional burials," she said.
