Drug-resistant malaria parasites are now firmly established in border regions in four Southeast Asian countries, imperiling global efforts to control the disease, experts warned on Wednesday.

The scientist who helped discover the Ebola virus said the outbreak in west Africa was unlikely to trigger a major epidemic outside the region, adding he would happily sit next to an infected person on a train.

Liberia announced Wednesday it was shutting all schools and placing "non-essential" government workers on 30 days' leave in a bid to halt the spread of the deadly Ebola epidemic raging in west Africa.

"All schools are ordered closed following further directives from the ministry of education," President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said in a televised address to the nation.

Doctors, nurses and hospital workers fighting the Ebola epidemic in west Africa are struggling with a daily burden of exhaustion, shortage of staff and fear for themselves over the deadly virus, specialists say.

Containing an outbreak by a lethal pathogen places big demands on workers in any health system, but this is especially the case in one of the world's poorest regions, they say.

The European Union is equipped and ready to treat victims should the deadly Ebola virus, which has killed hundreds in West Africa, be found in member states, EU sources said Wednesday.

"We cannot rule out the possibility that an infected person arrives in Europe but the EU has the means to track and contain any outbreak rapidly," one EU source said.

The new chairman of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) said Wednesday that he was determined to change the unhealthy lifestyle choices that have made his region the fattest in the world.

Palau President Tommy Remengesau said that junk food had become a blight on Pacific island communities, leading to epidemic rates of heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure among an increasingly obese population.

The teenager sits quietly in a Mumbai rehab clinic, a victim of India's emerging fad for the drug crystal meth, which experts say is spurred by loopholes in the country's giant chemical industry.

British nutritionists threw down the gauntlet to dietary guidelines in April by declaring seven daily portions of fresh fruit and vegetables, rather than the recommended five, were the key to health.

The deadly Ebola virus hitchhiking across borders for the first time aboard a pan-African airline could spell new flight restrictions aimed at containing outbreaks, the world aviation agency said Tuesday.

International Civil Aviation Organization Secretary General Raymond Benjamin said, "Until now (the virus) had not impacted commercial aviation, but now we're affected."

Kent Brantly always wanted to be a medical missionary, and he took the work seriously, spending months treating a steady stream of patients with Ebola in Liberia.

Now Brantly is himself a patient, fighting for his own survival in an isolation unit on the outskirts of Monrovia, Liberia, after contracting the deadly disease.