Health experts from 16 European countries beseeched their governments Friday to massively scale up manpower and resources to fight west Africa's Ebola epidemic, now threatening "the entire world".

European countries should urgently send trained medical staff, field laboratories, protective clothing, disinfectants and basic tools like electricity generators, the 44 public health professionals and academics wrote in The Lancet medical journal.

In the wood-panelled rooms of Vienna's traditional coffee houses, tobacco-lovers can still light up pretty much as they please. But one of the last smokers' havens in Europe may be on course to kick the habit.

Even diehard smokers, when arriving in Austria, are in for a shock at the clouds of blue haze filling bars and restaurants, long after the rest of western and central Europe stubbed out puffing in public places.

Cuba said it will send nearly 300 more doctors and nurses to west Africa to help fight the Ebola epidemic.

This will raise to 461 the number of Cuban medical personnel that the country will send to battle the disease.

Sierra Leone has ordered the quarantine "with immediate effect" of three districts and 12 tribal chiefdoms -- affecting more than one million people -- in the largest lockdown in west Africa's deadly Ebola outbreak.

President Ernest Bai Koroma, in a national televised address late Wednesday, announced that the northern districts of Port Loko and Bombali were to be closed off along with the southern district of Moyamba -- effectively sealing off around 1.2 million people.

President Goodluck Jonathan appeared to jump the gun on medical advice at home on Wednesday to tell an applauding UN General Assembly that Nigeria was free of the deadly Ebola virus.

"We can confidently say that today Nigeria is Ebola free," Jonathan told the largest diplomatic gathering in the world to a ripple of applause at UN headquarters in New York.

A new government study suggests the number of U.S. adults who have tried electronic cigarettes may be leveling off.

The proportion of adults who have ever used e-cigarettes rose from about 3 percent to 8 percent from 2010 to 2012. But there was no significant change last year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.

The patient, a slight woman in her 30s, lay motionless on the stretcher as a half-dozen men in biohazard suits transferred her from a C-27J cargo plane into an ambulance and then into a mobile hospital isolation ward, never once breaking the plastic seal encasing her.

The exercise put on Wednesday was just a simulation of the procedures that would be used to evacuate an Ebola patient to Italy. But for Italian military, Red Cross and health care workers, it offered essential experience, especially for those on the front lines of the country's sea-rescue operation involving thousands of African migrants who arrive here every day in smugglers' boats.

U.S. health officials Tuesday laid out worst-case and best-case scenarios for the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, warning that the number of infected people could explode to at least 1.4 million by mid-January — or peak well below that, if efforts to control the outbreak are ramped up.

The widely varying projections by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were based on conditions in late August and do not take into account a recent international surge in medical aid for the stricken region. That burst has given health authorities reason for some optimism.

Three more people have died from Legionnaire's disease in Catalonia in northeastern Spain, officials said Tuesday, bringing to seven the death toll from the lung infection in the region in just over a week.

The three deaths took place in Ripollet, a town near Barcelona, Catalonia's health department said.

A simple breath test may one day show whether someone has a strain of tuberculosis that will respond to a frontline antibiotic, or a drug-resistant type, scientists said Tuesday.

Building on previous work for a fast-track breath test, their new prototype technique looks for traces of nitrogen gas emitted by the disease-causing germ Mycobacterium tuberculosis.