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Health workers are monitoring 82
people who had contact with a toddler who died of Ebola in Mali
last week, but no new cases of the disease have yet been
reported, World Health Organization spokesman Tarik Jasarevic
said on Tuesday.

Three WHO officials are already in the country, having
travelled to Mali a week ago to test its Ebola preparedness, and
five more are arriving, Jasarevic said.

Mali became the sixth West African country to report a case
of the disease, and health officials want to try to contain the
virus before it can spread out of control.

It has already killed some 5,000 people in Sierra Leone,
Liberia and Guinea, but Senegal and Nigeria both stopped the
virus in its tracks by tracking down hundreds of people who had
contact with the person who first brought it into their country
and monitoring them constantly for symptoms.

The girl had travelled with her grandmother hundreds of
kilometres by bus from Guinea via Mali's capital and was
hospitalised in the western Malian town of Kayes on Oct. 20, but
died four days later.

WHO has said the girl already started showing symptoms
including fever, vomiting and blood in her stools - and was
therefore contagious - before being taken to Kayes.

Jasarevic said the 2-year-old girl's grandmother was "doing
OK so far", but the deadly disease can take up to 21 days to
show up in a patient, so all the 82 contacts who have been
traced, including 11 health workers, will continue to be
monitored.

Diplomatic sources have expressed concern about the
preparedness of Mali, one of the world's poorest countries, to
contain an outbreak. Home to a large U.N. peacekeeping mission,
the mostly Muslim country is still battling northern Islamist
militants after a brief French-led war last year.

The possibility of setting up a treatment centre in Kayes
was being discussed, Jasarevic said, and 40 volunteers had been
trained in contact tracing, which is considered one of the key
defences against the fast-spreading disease.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay and Tom Miles; Editing by
Alison Williams)