Ebola
Health workers carry the body of an Ebola virus victim in Kenema, Sierra Leone,Reuters

The Ebola death toll has gone up to 5,160, a latest estimate from the World Health Organisation (WHO) reveals.

When the situation report was released on 12 November, the disease had already infected about 14,098 people across the world.

The deadly virus has mainly affected eight countries, including Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Spain, United States, Nigeria and Senegal. Nigeria and Senegal are now completely free from the deadly virus and were declared Ebola-free in October.

The new report found the situation in Liberia and Guinea promising as the countries reported fewer new cases of Ebola recently compared to the past.

Also, Tolbert Nyenswah, assistant health minister of Liberia, had earlier revealed to the AFP that new cases of Ebola have come down from 500 to 50 a day.

However, Sierra Leone continued its struggle with more reports of new cases of the deadly disease.

"There is some evidence that case incidence is no longer increasing nationally in Guinea and Liberia, but steep increases persist in Sierra Leone," the report said.

However, an online investigation shows that new cases in Sierra Leone are also slowly going down. On Wednesday, 12 November, Sierra Leone had 66 new cases of Ebola, compared to the 95 and 90 new cases in 12 and 11 November, respectively.

The WHO confirmed that there were four "reported, confirmed and probable cases" of Ebola and four deaths in Mali. The health experts also urged the three affected West African countries to strengthen their safety measures, including proper isolation plus treatment and follow safe burial practices.

However, in these affected countries, only 19 out of 53 Ebola treatment centres have been fully functioning and only 140 trained burial teams out of 370 are available for service, the BBC reported.

How did the Disease Get its Name Ebola?

Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) has been named after the Ebola River in Yambuku, a small village in Mongala District in Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) in Central Africa, where the deadly virus first appeared in 1976.

A Belgian scientist named Peter Piot and his team have been credited with the ground-breaking discovery. Piot is currently the Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, according to a BBC report

All about the 2014 Ebola Outbreak

The latest Ebola outbreak, according to the WHO, started on 23 March in Guinea. However, a team of international team of researchers and experts from the WHO later tracked the first case of Ebola in a two-year-old boy in Meliandou, a village in southern Guinea, who contracted the disease from an infected bat and died from it in December 2013.