News: WHO says more than 5,000 have now died of Ebola

More than 5,000 people have died in the Ebola outbreak that is ravaging West Africa, the World Health Organization reported Wednesday, marking another grisly toll in the epidemic.

This is the largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded, with more than 14,000 people sickened, the vast majority in the West African countries of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

There are some signs that the rate of new infections may be slowing overall in Guinea and Liberia, but there are still areas of those countries where transmission remains high, and they are surging in Sierra Leone, the health agency said Wednesday. While the response to Ebola is ramping up, it is still insufficient: In Sierra Leone, for instance, less than 40 percent of cases are in isolation, according to WHO estimates.

Worryingly, the virus has continued to pop up in new places, both within the most affected countries and outside their borders. The most recent example is a new Ebola cluster that Malian authorities reported Wednesday — an alarming setback as the country tries to limit the epidemic ravaging other West African nations.

A nurse working at a clinic in the Malian capital Bamako died Tuesday, and tests later showed she had Ebola, Communications Minister Mahamadou Camara said Wednesday. Two other people are also believed to have died of Ebola, though no tests were ever done on them to confirm the disease: an imam, whom the nurse treated at the Bamako clinic, and a friend who came to visit the man there.

The announcement of the new cases came just a day after Malian health authorities said there had been no other reported cases — let alone deaths — since a 2-year-old girl who had traveled to Mali from Guinea succumbed to the virus in late October.