An Italian doctor who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone is being flown to Italy, the Health Ministry in Rome said yesterday.

The ministry said the doctor, who had been working for the humanitarian group Emergency, was in a stable condition and was eating and drinking on his own.

He was expected to arrive during the night and will be treated in the Lazzaro Spallanzani infectious diseases institute in Rome, the ministry said.

The UN Ebola Emergency Response Mission will not fully meet its December 1 target for containing the virus due to escalating numbers of cases in Sierra Leone and elsewhere, Anthony Banbury, the head of UNMEER, said late yesterday.

The mission set the goal in September of having 70 per cent of Ebola patients under treatment and 70 per cent of Ebola victims safely buried. That target will be achieved in some areas, Banbury said, citing Liberia.

“We are going to exceed the December 1 targets in some areas. But we are almost certainly going to fall short in others. In both those cases, we will adjust to what the circumstances are on the ground,” he said in an interview.

Banbury said the areas of greatest concern are in rural parts of Sierra Leone as well as the city of Makeni in the centre of the country and Port Loko in the northwest.

Surveillance to prevent further cross-border spread of the disease must be improved, he added, given the transmission of the disease overland from Guinea into Mali, where at least six people have now died.

The death toll in the worst Ebola epidemic on record has risen to 5,459.