Liberian security forces stand in front of protesters after clashes at West Point neighbourhood in Monrovia. Police in the Liberian capital fired live rounds and teargas on Wednesday to disperse a stone-throwing crowd trying to break an Ebola quarantine imposed on their neighbourhood.

South Africa yesterday issued a ban on non-citizens travelling from three West African countries worst affected by Ebola.

A health ministry statement declared “a total travel ban for all non-citizens travelling from these high risk countries,” referring to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

South Africans returning home from these areas will undergo strict screening, it added.

Authorities also barred non-essential travel to the three countries.

South Africa has so far been Ebola-free despite two scares in as many weeks: a South African man returning from Liberia and a Guinean woman.

Both tested negative.

Johannesburg is a major hub for air travel between southern Africa and the rest of the continent.

Meanwhile, the UN’s new pointman on Ebola was due to arrive today for a visit aimed at shoring up health services in the region where at least 1,350 lives have been lost to the virus.

David Nabarro, a British physician appointed last week by UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon, said he would focus on “revitalising the health sectors” in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

“One of the major issues is that health sectors and health services in countries affected by Ebola have really suffered,” Nabarro told reporters in New York ahead of his trip.

Nabarro will travel to Monrovia, Freetown, Conakry and Abuja as part of his overall mission to co-ordinate the global response to the worst-ever outbreak of the haemorrhagic fever.

His visit comes at a time when affected countries are scrambling to contain the spread of the killer disease.

Guinea, where the outbreak first appeared earlier this year, sent more than 100 doctors and volunteers to its borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia yesterday to monitor people entering the country for signs of Ebola.

The move is part of a plan introduced under Guinea’s state of emergency, which was declared earlier this month in an effort to stop the spread of the virus that has killed 396 people in the country to date.

“It is necessary that everyone living outside our borders who wishes to enter our country be examined with the utmost rigour,” said Health Minister Colonel Remy Lamah.

The measures in Guinea followed a chaotic day in Liberia’s capital, where violence erupted in an Ebola quarantine zone as soldiers opened fire and used tear gas on protesting crowds.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf had ordered a nighttime curfew and the quarantine of Monrovia’s West Point slum and Dolo Town, to the east of the capital, in a bid to stem the outbreak.

Residents of West Point, where club-wielding youths stormed an Ebola medical facility on Saturday, reacted with fury to the crackdown, hurling stones and shouting at the security forces.

Liberia, with 576 deaths from 972 diagnosed cases, has seen the biggest toll among the four West African countries hit by Ebola.

Deaths from the epidemic that has swept through West Africa since March now stand at 1,350 after a surge of 106 victims in just two days, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). 

From its initial outbreak in Guinea, the virus spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, overwhelming inadequate public health services already battling common deadly diseases such as malaria.

Straining the situation even further, several top officials leading the fight have lost their lives to the disease.

A doctor who treated Nigeria’s first Ebola patient was named among the dead on Tuesday, taking the death toll in Africa’s most populous country to five.

Fears that the virus could spread to other continents have seen flights to the region cancelled, and authorities around the world have adopted measures to screen travellers arriving from affected nations.

Vietnam said on Wednesday it had released two Nigerian air travellers from isolation after their fevers subsided. In Myanmar a local man is still undergoing tests after arriving from Guinea with a fever.