Asian countries worry about ability to cope with Ebola

The longer the Ebola outbreak rages in West Africa, the greater chance a traveller infected with the virus touches down in an Asian city.

How quickly any case is detected - and the measures taken once it is - will determine whether the virus takes hold.

Governments are ramping up response plans, but health experts in the region's less developed countries fear any outbreak would be hard to contain.

"Even a country like the United States has not been able to completely prevent it," said Yatin Mehta, a critical care specialist at the Medanta Medicity hospital near New Delhi. "The government ... are preparing and they are training, but our record of disaster management has been very poor in the past."

More than 10,000 people hadbeen infected with Ebola and nearly half of them died, said the World Health Organisation, with a rapidly rising death toll in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. There have also been cases in three other West African countries, and Spain and the US.

Early symptoms include fever, headache, body aches, cough, stomach pain, vomiting, and diarrhoea, and patients are not contagious until those begin. The virus requires close contact with body fluids to spread, so health care workers and family members caring for loved ones are most at risk.