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.

Health officials in Australia have confirmed a 57-year-old woman is being tested for Ebola after returning to the country from Sierra Leone.

A US man who contracted Ebola while working as a freelance cameraman in Liberia has been flown back to his home country for treatment.

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

About 80 people are now being monitored for symptoms of Ebola in Texas, health officials said, after a man was diagnosed with the disease in Dallas.

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 patient at a Dallas hospital has tested positive for Ebola, the first case of the disease to be diagnosed in the United States.

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.

A toddler known as ‘patient zero’ who died before Christmas is believed to be the first victim who sparked the ebola crisis.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared the Ebola outbreak in West Africa to be an international public health emergency that requires an extraordinary response to stop its spread.

The second American aid worker recently diagnosed with Ebola in west Africa was en route to Atlanta today after a customs and refuelling stop in Maine.

The doctor who treated a man who flew to Nigeria and died of Ebola has now contracted the disease, authorities said.