Ebola virus may have spread to Mali

Mali on Thursday identified its first possible cases of Ebola since the start of an outbreak in neighboring Guinea, adding to fears that the deadly virus was spreading across West Africa.

More than 90 people have already died in Guinea and Liberia in what the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, has warned could turn into an unprecedented epidemic in an impoverished region with poor health services.

Foreign mining companies have locked down operations and pulled out some international staff in mineral-rich Guinea. French health authorities have also put doctors and hospitals on alert in case people traveling to and from former colonies in the region pick up the disease.

Three people in Mali had been placed in quarantine, and samples were sent to health officials in the United States for tests, Malian government officials said in a statement aired on public television late Thursday.

"Three suspected cases of hemorrhagic fever have been detected in the country. Samples have been taken and sent abroad for analysis," the country's Health Minister Ousmane Kone told Agence France-Presse.

Pending results from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where the samples were sent, the patients were isolated and were receiving appropriate medication.

"A high-speed intervention team has been created to follow the evolution of the situation on the ground," read the statement that aired on television. It added that the health of the three suspected victims was showing signs of improving.

The latest outbreak originated in Guinea two months ago and has since spread to neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia. Gambia placed two people in quarantine, although that country's Health Ministry recently said the cases were negative.

Guinea's Health Ministry said two more suspected victims of the virus had died, bringing its death count to 86.

Liberia also reported three new deaths among its suspected 14 cases, raising its death toll to seven.

"We need to fight to contain it. A medical team from MSF came today to help train some of our health workers," said Walter Gwenegale, Liberia's health minister.

The disease, which has killed 1,500 people since it was first recorded in 1976 in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, causes vomiting, diarrhea and external bleeding. It has a fatality rate of up to 90 percent.

Many health systems in West Africa are poorly equipped to deal with an epidemic, and aid workers have warned of the difficulty of fighting infections scattered across several locations and in densely populated areas such as Guinea's capital, Conakry.

Some blame the government for not immediately quarantining an individual who carried the virus from the remote south, where the bulk of the 137 cases are reported, to the capital.

There have now been 16 cases in Conakry, among them five deaths, a spokesman for the World Health Organization said Friday.

"How can we trust them now? We have to look after ourselves," Dede Diallo, a Guinean who has stopped working and kept her children at home since the outbreak, told Reuters. 

Conakry's luxury Palm Camayenne Hotel, popular among businessmen and politicians, is running at less than a third of occupancy, according to a receptionist.

Flight data told a similar story. A round-trip Brussels Airlines flight between the Belgian capital and Conakry on Thursday had just 55 people arriving and 200 leaving, an airline employee said.

Regional airline Gambia Bird delayed the start of a route to Conakry due to begin last weekend, while Senegal has closed its border with Guinea because of the outbreak.

Wire services