GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — The World Health Organisation said yesterday the Ebola infection rate could soon reach 10,000 a week as world leaders prepared to hold talks on the crisis at the United Nations.

WHO Assistant Director General Bruce Aylward, describing his figures as a working forecast, said the epidemic “could reach 5,000 to 10,000 cases per week by the first week of December”.

The latest death toll is 4,447, from 8,914 recorded infection cases, Aylward said as the worst-ever Ebola outbreak spirals in the three hardest-hit countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

The United Nations was due to hold talks later yesterday on a public health crisis that the WHO has called the “most severe in modern times”.

On Monday, US President Barack Obama and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for the international campaign against the haemorrhagic virus, which is killing seven out of every 10 people infected, to be intensified.

Governments in west Africa have been scrambling to contain the epidemic, with patients in the Liberian capital describing devastating scenes as patients struggled to survive during a strike by health workers.

A 56-year-old Sudanese doctor who had worked as a UN volunteer in Liberia died of Ebola on Monday night after arriving in Germany last week for treatment.

Outside west Africa, medical staff have also been particularly at risk during the crisis, with at least two cases of contamination reported despite stringent safety protocols.

A nurse in the Texan city of Dallas, Nina Pham, said she was “doing well” after catching the virus while caring for a Liberian Ebola patient, but authorities warned 76 workers may have been exposed during his 10-day stay in the hospital.

Spanish nurse Teresa Romero, 44, is thought to have caught Ebola while treating an elderly missionary who was infected in Sierra Leone and died on September 25.

Ninety-five Liberian health workers have died so far in the epidemic. Their colleagues want compensation for the risk of dealing with Ebola, which spreads through contact with bodily fluids and for which there is no vaccine or widely available treatment.

In the US, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a $25-million donation to the US Centers for Disease Control Foundation to help efforts to contain the epidemic.

British troops began loading a ship that will set sail for Sierra Leone this week to help in efforts to contain the outbreak.

The UN nuclear agency said it would send specialised equipment to the west African countries hit by the Ebola outbreak to help faster diagnosis.

The machine uses so-called Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction technology that allows the Ebola virus “to be detected within a few hours, while other methods require growing on a cell culture for several days,” the IAEA said.

“Early diagnosis… if combined with appropriate medical care, increases the victims’ chance of survival and helps curtail the spread of the disease,” it said in a statement.