World Bank chief sees mixed progress in West Africa Ebola battle

SEOUL (Reuters) - The World Bank's president on Wednesday reported mixed progress in the fight against the deadly Ebola virus in West Africa, pointing to encouraging signs in Liberia and a more worrisome trend in neighboring Sierra Leone. Some 5,000 people have been killed during the current Ebola outbreak, the deadliest on record, with most of the fatalities in the West African countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. "There’s some good news coming out of Liberia in terms of reduced number of cases, at least coming to the hospitals," World Bank Group president Jim Yong Kim told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday in Seoul. "But then there is more concerning news coming out of Sierra Leone, where regions that were thought to be under control have now seen a surge in cases, and this is what we see with Ebola - we see drops and then we see surges," he said. "So the effort is going to take a long time. The effort is going to require ... thousands of health workers and we need countries to step up right now to provide those workers so that we can begin really tackling the end game, which is to get to zero in each of these three countries," he said. On Wednesday, Australia's prime minister said the country would fund an Ebola treatment clinic in Sierra Leone, responding to pressure from the World Bank to do more to tackle the deadly outbreak at its source. (Reporting by Christine Kim and Tony Munroe; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)