Health authorities struggling to control the worst outbreak of Ebola on record said drastic action is needed to prevent more deaths. 
 
 More than 390 people have died in the outbreak in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the World Health Organization said in a statement today. That toll is greater than the 280 people killed in 1976, when the virus was first identified near the Ebola River in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. 
 
 The WHO plans to meet with health ministers from 11 countries July 2-3 in Accra, Ghana, to agree on a plan to bring the outbreak under control. Health workers will have to tackle resistance from local people who are hiding infected family members, destroying medicines intended to help and adhering to rituals that fuel the spread of the virus. 
 
 “This is no longer a country-specific outbreak but a sub-regional crisis that requires firm action by governments and partners,” said Luis Sambo, the WHO’s regional director for Africa. “WHO is gravely concerned of the ongoing cross-border transmission into neighboring countries as well as the potential for further international spread.” 
 
 The outbreak is expected to last another three to four months, focused around the “hot spot” in the rural border areas where the three countries meet, said Francis Kasolo, the WHO’s director of disease prevention and control for Africa. 
 
 Crossing Borders 
 
 “What we are seeing is a lot of cross-border movement,” Kasolo said in a telephone interview. “When somebody comes in contact with a sick person in Guinea and crosses into Sierra Leone, as long as they don’t report having come into contact with an Ebola patient, there is a grave possibility that that person will transmit the disease.” 
 
 At next week’s meeting, the WHO will discuss forming a multi-country team that will share information daily on Ebola cases and people who have come into contact with those infected, Kasolo said. The Geneva-based organization has deployed more than 150 people to fight the epidemic, with tasks including surveillance, communication, infection control, logistics and data management. 
 
 The virus is also spreading because some hospitals are allowing infected patients to leave. Unsafe burial practices are also contributing. 
 
 Effective communication of safe measures to local communities is a major challenge that will be discussed in Accra, said WHO spokesman Daniel Epstein. 
 
 Educational Effort 
 
 “If there isn’t a strong public-health information and education component to the control activities, then people don’t understand and end up infecting themselves and doing things they shouldn’t be doing,” said David Heymann, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who has studied Ebola since the first outbreak in 1976. 
 
 Guinea has pockets of resistance, mainly in the town of Gueckedou, the epicenter of the disease, said Remy Lamah, the country’s health minister. 
 
 “There are always citizens who remain attached to their rites, their traditions and others do not even believe that Ebola exists,” he said by phone today from Conakry, Guinea’s capital. “We want to use teachers and students during the holidays for awareness caravans in their communities.” 
 
 The WHO is also recruiting Ebola survivors to speak at next week’s meeting and share their experience with their own communities to try to end resistance to control efforts. 
 
 ‘Denial Barrier’ 
 
 “That’s one of the ways of trying to break the denial barrier of saying Ebola is just another disease,” Kasolo said. “We want them to be advocates within the communities where they come from on this particular disease.” 
 
 Suspicion of health workers’ motives has thwarted initiatives in some places. In Sierra Leone, youths in Kailahun burned drugs and other supplies, claiming the medicines were meant to kill Ebola patients, the country’s ministry of health and sanitation said this week. 
 
 Some households in Sierra Leone’s Kenema district are also hiding infected family members until they become very ill, health minister Miatta Kargbo said in an interview. Bogus vaccination programs are also causing undue confusion. 
 
 “The ministry wishes the general public to know that there is no vaccine for Ebola and it has not instituted any Ebola vaccine immunization in schools,” the ministry said in a statement. “The act of spreading this misleading and scaring information is a criminal offense and people involved in this act are warned to desist forthwith.” 
 
 In Liberia, traditions of waiting to bury bodies for months and touching the dead have made controlling the spread harder, Tolbert Nyesuah, assistant minister for health said. Denial that that disease exists has also complicated containment, he said. 
 
 Neighboring Countries 
 
 There is low risk at present that the outbreak will spread to other nations, Kasolo said. Still, officials from neighboring countries such as Mali, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Gambia have been invited to attend the Accra meeting in case the disease spreads, he said. The Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda will share their experiences dealing with past outbreaks. 
 
 “We still think we have another three to four months to go with the epidemic, but the duration will be influenced by how national governments and affected communities respond,” Kasolo said. 
 
 For Related News and Information: Sierra Leone Youths Burn Drugs Claiming to Prevent Ebola Deaths 
 
 To contact the reporter on this story: Makiko Kitamura in London at mkitamura1@bloomberg.net 
 
 To contact the editors responsible for this story: Phil Serafino at pserafino@bloomberg.net David Risser, Kristen Hallam ||||| Conakry (AFP) - West Africa's Ebola-hit nations have agreed to impose a cross-border isolation zone at the epicentre of the world's worst-ever outbreak, amid warnings that the deadly epidemic is spiralling out of control. 
 
 The announcement came at an emergency summit in the Guinean capital on Friday to discuss the outbreak, which has killed more than 700 people, with the World Health Organization warning Ebola could cause "catastrophic" loss of life and severe economic disruption if it continued to spread. 
 
 View photo . 
 
 "These areas will be isolated by police and military. The people in these areas being isolated will be provided with material support," she said at the meeting in Conakry. 
 
 Opening the summit, WHO chief Margaret Chan told leaders that the response of the three countries to the epidemic had been "woefully inadequate", revealing that the outbreak was "moving faster than our efforts to control it". 
 
 "If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences can be catastrophic in terms of lost lives but also severe socio-economic disruption and a high risk of spread to other countries," Chan said. 
 
 She described the outbreak as "by far the largest ever in the nearly four-decade history of this disease". 
 
 "It is taking place in areas with fluid population movements over porous borders, and it has demonstrated its ability to spread via air travel, contrary to what has been seen in past outbreaks," she told the summit. 
 
 "Cases are occurring in rural areas which are difficult to access, but also in densely populated capital cities. This meeting must mark a turning point in the outbreak response." 
 
 - $100 million action plan - 
 
 The leaders of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea used the summit to launch a $100 million (75 million euro) action plan that will see several hundred more medical staff deployed to battle the epidemic. 
 
 The three countries will also bolster efforts to prevent and detect suspected cases, urge better border surveillance, and reinforce the WHO's sub-regional outbreak coordination centre in Guinea. 
 
 Darab did not outline the exact area to be part of the isolation zone, but the epicentre of the outbreak has a diameter of almost 300 kilometres (185 miles), spreading from Kenema in eastern Sierra Leone to Macenta in southern Guinea, and taking in most of Liberia's extreme northern forests. 
 
 "The healthcare services in these zones will be strengthened for treatment, testing and contact tracing to be carried out effectively," she said. 
 
 The meeting came after Dubai's Emirates became the first global airline to announce it was suspending flights to the stricken area, while the United States, Germany, France and Italy have issued warnings against travel to the three African countries. 
 
 US President Barack Obama announced on Friday that the United States would screen delegates travelling from Ebola-hit countries to Washington for a three-day Africa summit next week. 
 
 Two Americans infected with Ebola in West Africa will be evacuated back to the United States in the coming days to be cared for in strict isolation, US officials said. 
 
 Kent Brantly, a doctor who was treating Ebola patients in Liberia, and Christian missionary worker Nancy Writebol, were being flown home, but it was not immediately clear when they would arrive back in the US. 
 
 Meanwhile Nigeria quarantined two people who had "primary contact" with a man who died of Ebola in Lagos last week. 
 
 The WHO raised the death toll by 57 to 729 on Thursday, announcing that 122 new cases had been detected between Thursday and Sunday last week, bringing the total to more than 1,300. 
 
 "Current numbers of national and international response staff are woefully inadequate," Chan said, revealing that 60 health workers had died treating patients in the outbreak. 
 
 - State of emergency - 
 
 Sierra Leone's leader Ernest Bai Koroma has announced a state of emergency, quarantining Ebola-hit areas and cancelling foreign trips by ministers, while Liberia has closed all of its schools and put government workers on leave. 
 
 Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf warned ahead of the summit that the crisis was "nearing a catastrophe" and appealed for more doctors and supplies. 
 
 Ebola, which has no vaccine, causes severe muscular pain, fever, headaches and, in the worst cases, unstoppable bleeding. 
 
 It has killed around two-thirds of those it has infected since its emergence in 1976, with two outbreaks registering fatality rates approaching 90 percent. 
 
 The death rate in the current outbreak is a lower-than-average 55 percent. 
 
 Fears that it could spread to other continents through air travel have been growing, with European and Asian countries on alert alongside African countries outside the Ebola crisis zone. 
 
 In Britain, Sierra Leone cyclist Moses Sesay was quarantined and tested for Ebola at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, before being given the all-clear, the athlete told a British newspaper. 
 
 Kenya, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Benin said they had enhanced screening at border points and airports. ||||| MONROVIA/FREETOWN (Reuters) - People in Sierra Leone and Liberia filled churches on Sunday to seek deliverance from an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus, defying official warnings to avoid public gatherings to contain an epidemic that has killed nearly 1,000 people in West Africa. 
 
 With their creaking healthcare systems completely overrun, Sierra Leone and Liberia have both declared states of emergency to tackle the highly contagious and incurable disease, which has also stricken neighbouring Guinea. 
 
 People still flocked to sing and pray at churches in Liberia's ramshackle ocean-front capital Monrovia, many of them comparing Ebola to the brutal civil war that ravaged the country between 1989 and 2003, killing nearly a quarter of a million people. 
 
 One of the deadliest diseases known to man, Ebola kills up to 90 percent of those infected. Discovered nearly 40 years ago deep in the forests of central Africa, its symptoms include internal and external bleeding, diarrhoea and vomiting. 
 
 "Everyone is so afraid," said Martee Jones Seator at Saint Peter's Lutheran Church. "Ebola is not going to shake our faith in any way ... because we've been through difficult times." 
 
 With the disease now in four African countries - following the death in Nigeria last month of a U.S. citizen who arrived from Liberia - the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Friday classified the epidemic as an international health emergency. 
 
 The WHO has said that the world's worst outbreak of Ebola -- with 1,779 cases and 962 deaths -- will likely continue for months as the region's healthcare systems struggle to cope. It has appealed urgently for funding and emergency medical staff. 
 
 A WHO medical ethics committee will discuss next week the use of experimental drugs to tackle the outbreak after two U.S. aid workers showed improvement after being treated with ZMapp, a drug developed by California-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical. 
 
 Spain on Sunday authorised the use of the ZMapp on 75-year-old Spanish priest Miguel Pajares - the first European infected - who was evacuated to Madrid last week after contracting the haemorrhagic fever while working in a hospital in Monrovia. A Congolese nun who worked with him died there on Saturday. 
 
 British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline said on Sunday a clinical trial of a vaccine was due to start shortly. Three U.S. laboratories established to quickly make vaccines in the event of a public health threat also said they were standing by to support any U.S. effort to tackle Ebola. 
 
 With no other treatment available, churches in Monrovia furnished plastic buckets containing chlorinated water for worshippers to disinfect their hands. Inside, pastors told their congregations to follow instructions from health workers, some of whom have been attacked by locals terrified by the disease. 
 
 "We are in trouble here. We are in trouble," Reverend Marcus MacKay, dressed in a green gown, said before the altar. "But you know what? There is no way this devil is going to do its work!" 
 
 STARTED IN FORESTS OF GUINEA 
 
 Though this outbreak was first identified in March in the remote forest region of southeastern Guinea, scientists have traced the first recorded case as far back as early December, to a 2-year-old boy near the town of Gueckedou. 
 
 Many believe the virus was carried by fruit bats from central Africa, where it is regarded as endemic. Yet it is not clear how it jumped into the human population in West Africa. 
 
 Quarantine measures imposed on infected communities have hit trade and food supplies in some of the world's poorest countries. 
 
 In Sierra Leone, Bishop Abu Aiah Koroma of the evangelical Flaming Bible Church in Freetown said price hikes were destroying the nation's economy, branding Ebola "a devil". 
 
 Speaking amid chants of "Alleluia" and "Amen" from his packed church, Koroma called for penitence "to avert this plague from our country". 
 
 Concern over the spread of Ebola grew after it spread to Nigeria - Africa's most populous country - in late July. Seven cases of Ebola have now been confirmed there, including two deaths, and authorities have declared a national emergency. 
 
 In a bid to prevent Ebola reaching the United States, health officials in North Carolina said on Sunday they would require missionaries and others coming home after working with people infected with Ebola to be placed in quarantine. 
 
 Burkina Faso became the latest African country on Sunday to announce stringent airport health checks and border controls to protect itself from infection. 
 
 In Senegal, which borders Guinea to the north, a man has been isolated in the northern region of Matam while tests were conducted for Ebola, the APS state news agency reported. 
 
 Tests on suspected cases in Hong Kong, Canada and Saudi Arabia in recent days have all proved negative. 
 
 (Reporting by Daniel Flynn; Editing by Stephen Powell and Sandra Maler) ||||| (CNN) -- Hundreds dead. Many more infected. Pervasive fear and denial are challenging authorities in west Africa who are trying to assess and address the Ebola crisis. 
 
 So far, it has killed more than 650 people, says Doctors Without Borders. 
 
 That's the highest death toll the World Health Organization has recorded in an Ebola outbreak. And it's getting worse. 
 
 The swelling numbers prompted heads of state to cancel travel plans on Thursday to direct their full attention toward fighting the outbreak of the virus that has crippled parts of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea and stirred palpable concerns that it will spread around the region and the world. 
 
 Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Sierra Leone's President Ernest Koroma both canceled trips to the United States, and Koroma declared a state of emergency. 
 
 He announced a action plan that addressed many of the barriers international medical workers complain they face while fighting disease. 
 
 Some residents in affected villages have accused them of bringing the disease into the country and have barricaded their towns or otherwise blocked access to Ebola hemorrhagic fever victims. 
 
 A nurse with Doctors Without Borders, Monia Sayah, told CNN, "the most challenging" aspect of trying to help people is that "we go into communities where we are not necessarily welcome," because people don't want to believe they or their loved ones have Ebola -- in part because "they understand now that the survival rate is not very high." 
 
 Koroma said he will deploy police and military to accompany the aid workers. 
 
 They will search house to house for the infirm and enforce orders designed to curb the virus' spread. 
 
 What is the risk of catching Ebola on a plane? 
 
 Aid groups pull out 
 
 "The matter has reached a crisis point," Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown told CNN's Richard Quest. "...The dire prognosis is that it will get worse before it gets better." 
 
 The dangers are so real that some humanitarian organizations are pulling out to protect their own. 
 
 Samaritan's Purse -- an international evangelical Christian humanitarian agency -- and the missionary group Serving in Mission have recalled all nonessential personnel from Liberia. 
 
 The Peace Corps announced Wednesday it is doing the same, removing its 340 volunteers from that country, as well as Sierra Leone and Guinea. 
 
 While there are no confirmed cases, a spokeswoman for the agency did say that two volunteers did come in contact with someone who ended up dying from the virus. 
 
 Those Americans haven't shown signs of Ebola but are being isolated just in case, with the spokeswoman saying they can't return home until they get medical clearance to do so. 
 
 American dies 
 
 One American, 40-year-old Patrick Sawyer, died in a Nigerian hospital earlier this month -- having come from Liberia, where he was a top Ministry of Finance official, and before he could go back home to Minnesota to celebrate his daughters' birthdays. 
 
 But the vast majority of those afflicted are Africans. They come from big cities and small villages, some of them falling ill without really knowing what hit them. 
 
 "This epidemic is without precedent," said Bart Janssens, director of operations for Doctors Without Borders, a group also known as Médecins Sans Frontières. "It's absolutely not under control, and the situation keeps worsening." 
 
 As of now, the outbreak has been confined to west Africa. But there are rising concerns that it could spread, especially since a person may not know they have Ebola or show symptoms for two to 21 days after being infected. 
 
 Sawyer, for example, collapsed getting off a plane in Lagos, Nigeria. He very well could have made it out of the region, perhaps to the United States, before showing symptoms of Ebola; it's only then that the virus spreads. 
 
 To further complicate matters, signs of Ebola include fever, headaches, weakness and vomiting -- symptoms that also define many other ailments, from malaria to the flu that Brown notes often pop up "at this time of year." 
 
 For all these reasons and more, Janssens says, "If the situation does not improve fairly quickly, there is a real risk for new countries to be affected." 
 
 Could outbreak spread to U.S.? 
 
 2 infected Americans 
 
 Ebola spreads through the transmission of bodily fluids. Those most at risk are loved ones of those infected, as well as health care workers tending to the ill. 
 
 Sawyer is believed to have been infected by his ailing sister, who he spent time with in Liberia -- even though neither likely knew she had Ebola -- according to Brown. 
 
 Then there are those like Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan, who fell ill early last week while overseeing Ebola treatment at a Sierra Leone hospital and died days later. 
 
 Two Americans affiliated with Samaritan's Purse who also were infected "have shown a slight improvement in the past 24 hours" though both are in serious condition, according to the Christian humanitarian agency. 
 
 One of them is Dr. Kent Brantly, a 33-year-old who last lived in Fort Worth, Texas. He has been the medical director for the Ebola Consolidated Case Management Center in Monrovia, Liberia, where he has been providing care for Ebola patients since October. After testing positive for the virus, Brantly went into treatment at ELWA Hospital. 
 
 The other is Charlotte, North Carolina, resident Nancy Writebol, a Serving in Mission member working with Samaritan's Purse to help fight the Ebola outbreak. 
 
 Ebola fears hit close to home 
 
 It is believed one of the local staff was infected with Ebola and came to work with the virus on July 21 and 22, Samaritan's Purse Vice President Ken Isaacs said. That staff member died Thursday. 
 
 "We think it was in the scrub-down area where the disease was passed to both Nancy and Kent," he said. 
 
 Brown, the Liberian information minister, noted Brantly and Writebol's fight in his CNN interview, as well as Liberia's need for more health care workers like them. 
 
 "We join the families in prayers that they can come through this and become ... shining examples that, if care is taken, one can come out of this." 
 
 Liberian president: 'Ebola kills' 
 
 On Monday, the CDC issued an alert warning travelers to avoid hospitals with Ebola patients and funerals for those patients in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea due to the outbreak. 
 
 The United States is considering raising the alert to discourage "nonessential" travel to those three countries, a spokesman said. 
 
 Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has told the Ministry of Health to consider quarantines in some areas and cremating bodies in an attempt to prevent further infection, according to Brown. 
 
 The president also urged residents to avoid public amusement and entertainment areas, and set aside Friday "for the disinfection and chlorination of all public facilities." 
 
 "My fellow Liberians, Ebola is real. Ebola is contagious. And Ebola kills," Sirleaf said. "All of us must all take extra measures announced by the Ministry of Health to keep ourselves safe. 
 
 "The government will do its part. But you must do yours." 
 
 READ: Ebola doctor in Sierra Leone dies 
 
 READ: What you need to know 
 
 CNN's Jonathan Helman, Elise Labott, Pamela Brown and Nana Karikari-apau contributed to this report.
– The World Health Organization is calling an emergency meeting of health ministers from 11 countries next week in hopes of coming up with a plan to combat the worst outbreak of Ebola the world has ever seen. So far more than 390 people have died in the outbreak, which is stretching across Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, Bloomberg reports. That far exceeds the 280 killed when the disease debuted in 1976. "This epidemic is out of control," a Doctors Without Borders official said this week, according to the Guardian. This outbreak is proving especially deadly because it involves the most devastating of the five Ebola viruses; Zaire ebolavirus kills 79% of those infected, Vox explains. It's also the first major outbreak to hit West Africa, and workers there aren't sure how to deal with it—many hospitals, for example, are releasing infected patients. Among the general populace, education is even worse. In Sierra Leone, for instance, young people have burned drugs and supplies, believing that it was the medicine killing the patients. At its meeting next week, the WHO will seek to form a multi-country team to close that information gap. On the bright side, "the chance of Ebola spreading out of West Africa is very, very low," one specialist tells NPR—although if it did it would likely hit Paris next, because 10% of Guinea's air traffic out of its Conakry airport heads there.