Liberia said today it had found 17 Ebola patients who had fled an attack on their clinic, sparking a panicked manhunt across a city in the throes of a seemingly unstoppable epidemic.
The World Health Organization, meanwhile, 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.
Liberia's Information Minister Lewis Brown announced the return of the infected patients who had gone missing on Saturday after club-wielding youths raided a medical facility in a Monrovia slum.
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.
"All 17 patients who fled the Ebola centre have been accounted for," Brown told AFP.
WHO statistics showed that Liberia bore the brunt of the latest surge in fatalities, with 53 deaths, while there were 17 in Sierra Leone and 14 in Guinea.
But in a glimmer of possible good news, Brown said eight medical workers including two doctors who had been given experimental US-made drug ZMapp were responding to the treatment.
Overall, the UN health agency has tallied 2,240 cases of confirmed, probable and suspect Ebola infection since the outbreak began early this year, making it the deadliest since the discovery of the disease in the former Zaire in the 1970s.
From Guinea, where the current outbreak began, it has spread to three other states, overwhelming inadequate public health services already battling with common deadly diseases such as malaria.
Guinea has recorded a total of 543 cases and 394 deaths, Sierra Leone 848 cases and 365 deaths and Liberia 834 cases and 466 deaths.
Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, has 15 cases and four fatalities, according to WHO data.
Efforts to contain the spread across west Africa have run up against local distrust of outside doctors, and fears that aid workers may carry infection with them.
"At first people thought that when they got here, they were going to have all their blood removed and they would die," Nallo, being treated at an Ebola clinic this week in Sierra Leone, told AFP. And in Monrovia, Ebola has sown panic and irrational violence.
Youths raided the medical facility in the West Point slum in Monrovia on Saturday, sending the 17 Ebola patients fleeing for their lives -- and potentially spreading more of the lethal virus across the city.
