Fears of the Ebola virus have deepened with word that a second US nurse caught the disease from a patient and flew across the Midwest aboard an airliner the day before she was diagnosed.

A US nurse who caught Ebola while treating a Liberian patient who died of the disease has received a plasma transfusion donated by a doctor who beat the virus.

The first person to develop ebola in the US was struggling to survive at a Dallas hospital yesterday after his condition worsened to critical, the director of the US Centres for Disease Control said.

The condition of the man who brought the deadly Ebola disease to the US is now critical, hospital officials have said.

The airline passenger who brought Ebola into the US initially went to a Dallas emergency room last week but was sent home, despite telling a nurse that he had been in disease-ravaged West Africa, the hospital said.

A man who flew from Liberia to Texas has become the first patient infected with the deadly ebola virus to be diagnosed in the United States, health officials said, a sign the outbreak ravaging West Africa may spread globally.

US health officials laid out worst-case and best-case scenarios for the ebola epidemic in West Africa, warning that the number of infected people could explode to at least 1.4m by mid-January — or peak well below that, if efforts to control the outbreak are ramped up.

Ebola still has the “upper hand” in the outbreak that has killed more than 1,400 people in West Africa, but experts have the means to stop it, an American expert has said.

Luxembourg will support Britain’s legal challenge to Europe’s proposed financial transaction tax, the country’s finance minister Luc Frieden said yesterday.

The global swine flu outbreak has worsened as US authorities said hundreds of students at a New York school have fallen ill and federal officials said they expected to see US deaths from the virus.

European Union justice and interior ministers today debated whether to set an EU-wide age limit on sales of violent video and computer games.

European Union justice ministers have shelved proposals to outlaw the use of Nazi symbols after failing to agree on how such a ban could help fight racism and anti-Semitism.

A NEW MEXICO couple who travelled to New York have been hospitalised with what is believed to be the first case of bubonic plague in the city in a century, said health officials.