MONROVIA: Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf imposed a nighttime curfew from Wednesday and quarantined two affected neighbourhoods in a bid to stem the Ebola epidemic rampaging through West Africa.
"Commencing Wednesday, August 20 there will be a curfew from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am (2100 to 0600 GMT)," Sirleaf said in a radio address late Tuesday.
"All entertainment centres are to be closed. All video centres are to be closed at 6:00 pm," she ordered.
The new quarantine areas include Monrovia's West Point slum.
Earlier, Liberia's Information Minister Lewis Brown announced the return of 17 missing Ebola patients, who had fled a medical facility in West Point on Saturday after it was attacked by club-wielding youths.
Their disappearance had raised fears of a nightmare scenario of people with the highly contagious disease wandering the city, where unburied corpses have lain abandoned in the streets.
In Nigeria, meanwhile, a senior doctor who treated the country's first Ebola patient has died, taking the death toll in Africa's most populous country to five, health minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said on Tuesday.
Chukwu said Liberian-American Patrick Sawyer, 40, was "the most senior who participated in the management of the (first Ebola) patient" in the country.
The World Health Organization said the tropical virus had killed 84 people in just three days, a surge that has pushed the overall death toll from the West African outbreak to 1,229.
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