REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, FREETOWN/ACCRA - Sierra Leone declared a state of emergency and called in troops to quarantine epicentres of Ebola on Thursday, joining Liberia in imposing tough controls to curb the worst ever outbreak of the virus amid fears it could spread beyond West Africa.

Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma said he would meet with the leaders of Liberia and Guinea in Conakry on Friday to discuss the epidemic and that he was cancelling a visit to Washington for a US-Africa summit next week. Liberia on Wednesday announced the closure of all schools across the country and said it was considering quarantining affected communities.

"Sierra Leone is in a great fight ... Failure is not an option," Koroma said in a speech late on Wednesday, adding that the state of emergency would initially last between 60 and 90 days. "Extraordinary challenges require extraordinary measures."

The president said police and the military would enforce a quarantine on all epicentres of the disease, and would provide support to health officers and NGOs to do their work unhindered, following a number of attacks on health workers by local communities.

Ebola's symptoms include external bleeding, massive internal bleeding, vomiting and diarrhoea in its final stages. The disease kills up to 90 percent of those infected, though the fatality rate in the current epidemic is running at around 60 percent.

Ebola has been blamed for 672 deaths in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, according to the World Health Organization. It has also reached Nigeria's biggest city Lagos, where authorities said on Friday a man had died of the virus.

In a measure of rising international concern, Britain on Wednesday held a government meeting on Ebola, which it said was a threat it needed to respond to. But international airlines association IATA said the WHO was not recommending any travel restrictions or border closures due to the outbreak, and there would be a low risk to other passengers if an Ebola patient flew..

The outbreak of the hemorrhagic fever, for which there is no known cure, began in the forests of remote eastern Guinea in February, but Sierra Leone now has the highest number of cases.

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