EBOLA THREAT RISING IN SIERRA LEONE

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — Liberia is making some progress in containing the Ebola outbreak while the crisis in Sierra Leone is going to get worse, the top anti-Ebola officials in the two countries said. The news comes as nations are struggling with how to handle medical aid workers returning from Ebola-ravaged counties.

The people of Liberia and Sierra Leone must redouble their efforts to stop the disease, which has infected more than 13,000 people and killed nearly 5,000, the officials said. Their assessments underscore that Ebola remains a constant threat until the outbreak is wiped out. It can appear to be on the wane, only to re-emerge in the same place or balloon elsewhere if people don’t avoid touching Ebola patients or the bodies of those who succumb to the disease.

“We are in a crisis situation which is going to get worse,” Palo Conteh said in the Sierra Leone capital, in his first news conference as head of the National Ebola Response Center. “What is happening now should have been done three months ago.”

“Today we have a new and vicious enemy, an enemy that does not wear uniform, that … attacks anyone that comes into contact with (it) and if unchecked will ravage our beautiful land and its fine people,” he said.

The stark warning and call to action was echoed by others, even in neighboring Liberia, where the World Health Organization has said the rate of infection appears to be slowing, perhaps by as much by 25 percent week over week.

“We need to re-galvanize our efforts, accelerate the interventions, remain vigilant,” said Tolbert Nyenswah, the assistant minister of health who leads the Liberian government’s Ebola response.

Those warnings come as other nations work on protocols for allowing aid workers to return. North Korea announced mandatory 21-day quarantines for all foreigners Thursday, and experts warned that China was at risk of the disease spreading.

But nowhere has the struggle been more prominent than in the United States, where Doctors Without Borders nurse Kaci Hickox has been fighting a quarantine order in Maine.

Insisting she is perfectly healthy, Hickox again defied the state’s Ebola quarantine Thursday by taking a bike ride with her boyfriend, and Maine health authorities struggled to reach a compromise that would limit her contact with others.

Hickox, 33, stepped out of her home on the remote northern edge of Maine for the second day in a row, practically daring authorities to make good on their threat to go to court to have her confined against her will. On Wednesday evening, she went outside for an impromptu news conference and shook a reporter’s outstretched hand.

By Thursday evening, it was unclear whether the state had gone to court or whether there had been any progress toward ending the standoff that has become the nation’s most closely watched clash between personal freedom and fear of Ebola. The governor’s office and Hickox’s lawyers would not comment.

Hickox, who returned to the U.S. last week from treating Ebola victims in West Africa, has been under what Maine is calling a voluntary quarantine at her home.