The UN World Health Organization shut one of its only two laboratories in Sierra Leone and evacuated the staff after an epidemiologist was infected with the deadly Ebola virus.  It underscores the extreme danger that health workers face in trying to contain the West African Ebola Outbreak that has killed more than 1,427 people.

“This was the responsible thing to do.  The field team has been through a traumatic time through this incident,” said the WHO’s Dr. Daniel Kertesz.  “They are exhausted from many weeks of heroic work, helping patients infected with Ebola.  When you add a stressor like this, the risk of accidents increases.”

The WHO emphasizes that this is a temporary measure while the organization assesses the situation.  Once the facility is deemed ‘safe’, the other workers will be returned. 

The Senegalese epidemiologist is the first WHO worker to be infected.  He’s being treated in hospital in Sierra Leone, but will be evacuated from the country in the coming days.

In a study published in Tuesday’s online issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, American doctors say it’s critical that health workers wear personal protective equipment (PPE) designed to shield them from the bodily fluids of Ebola patients – items that are in short supply in impoverished West Africa.

“If transmission of Ebola is effectively interrupted with the use of barrier protection, why are so many health-care workers in the current outbreak being infected, particularly this late in the epidemic?” wrote Dr. William Fischer II from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.  “Two contributing factors include an insufficient supply of PPE and a lack of emphasis on the process of donning and doffing PPE.”

Nigeria’s health minister said on Tuesday his country had “thus far contained” the Ebola outbreak, brought to his country by an infected patient on a commuter flight. 

The vast majority of the 1,427 deaths and 2,615 infections have been in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia – where the head of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) went to assess the contagion and echoed earlier warnings that it is “even worse than we’d feared.”

“This is an absolute emergency,” said CDC Director Thomas Frieden.  “We have never seen anything on this scale with Ebola before.”  Such warnings had been stated by the WHO and the heroic international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) or “Doctors Without Borders”.

Before the outbreak, cremation was not a culturally acceptable practice in Liberia.  Dr. Friedan says it is becoming a widespread and necessary practice.

“We’ve seen patients with Ebola with nowhere to go, an increasing number of corpses put onto the street,” Frieden said.  “A whole system of picking up and cremating corpses has had to be developed.”

MSF says that, for the moment, it is planning a limited response to Africa’s second Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) Equateur Province – there are only so many resources to go around. 

“Usually, we would be able to mobilize specialist hemorrhagic fever teams, but we are currently responding to a massive epidemic in West Africa,” said MSF’s Jeroen Beijnberger in Congo.  “This is limiting our capacity to respond to the epidemic in Equateur Province.”

The United Nations mission in Congo on Tuesday said 13 people including five health workers had died from Ebola, which Congolese health officials say us a different strain than that in West Africa.  The WHO plans to send protective equipment for medical staff in Equateur.