President Barack Obama appointed an ebola tsar for the US, and the government said a Texas health worker who may have had contact with specimens from an ebola patient was isolated on a cruise ship.

The Nigerian city of Lagos shut down and quarantined a hospital where a man died of Ebola in the first recorded case of the highly infectious disease in Africa’s most populous country.

West African nations neighbouring those hit by the Ebola epidemic — Mali, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Guinea Bissau — should prepare for the possible arrival of people carrying the deadly virus, said the World Health Organisation.