Liberia police fire on protesters in Ebola quarantine

Liberian security forces stand in front of protesters after clashes at West Point neighbourhood in Monrovia August 20, 2014. [Photo/Agencies]

Witnesses said the clashes in West Point started after security forces early on Wednesday blocked roads to the neighbourhood with tables, chairs and barbed wire. Security forces also came in to escort the local commissioner out of the neighbourhood, they said.

Attempts to isolate the worst affected areas of the country and neighbouring Sierra Leone have raised fears of unrest in one of the world's poorest regions should communities start to run low on food and medical supplies.

"I don't have any food and we're scared," said Alpha Barry, a resident of West Point who said he came from Guinea and has four children under age 13.

In an effort to calm tensions, authorities on Wednesday started delivering tonnes of rice, oil and essential foodstuffs to West Point, residents and a government official said.

The World Food Programme has begun emergency food shipments to quarantined zones where a million people may be at risk of shortages. The WHO has appealed to companies and international organisations to continue providing supplies and services to countries at risk, saying there was a low risk of contagion.

The Ebola outbreak is putting off thousands of tourists who had planned trips to Africa this year, especially Asians, including to destinations thousands of miles from the nearest infected community such as Kenya and South Africa.

Containing the outbreak requires large numbers of specialist staff to map the epidemic, track people who have had contact with sufferers, and to work in isolation and treatment centres.

The WHO has pledged to massively scale up the international response, but so far there has been only a trickle of additional foreign healthcare workers to affected nations.

"The fear factor is high," Francis Kasolo, the coordinator of a WHO sub-regional Ebola outbreak coordination centre said. "We try and try. It is an ongoing process. The offer is not large. And they have to be the right profile of person."

West Point residents said they were given no warning of the blockade, which prevented them from getting to work or buying food. Many people in impoverished parts of Monrovia buy food to eat each day rather than stocking it.

Residents also said the closure immediately caused prices of basic goods, including drinking water sold in sachets, to soar.

"We just saw it (the blockade) this morning. We came out and we couldn't go anywhere. I haven't heard from anybody in authority what happened," Barry, 45, who works as a money changer, said.

The task authorities face is made harder by misinformation. One West Point resident said the government had sealed off the neighbourhood in order to bring the disease in.

A crowd at West Point looted a temporary holding centre for suspected Ebola cases at the weekend, 17 of whom fled. All 17 were now accounted for and being treated, and the government has abandoned plans for the centre due to fierce resistance.

Meanwhile, Democratic Republic of Congo has sent its health minister and a team of experts to the remote Equateur province after several people died there from a disease with Ebola-like symptoms, a local official and a professor said.

It was not immediately clear if there was any connection with Ebola.