“The identification of patient contacts for daily monitoring has reportedly reached 99 per cent,” WHO said. “Based on experiences in Senegal and Nigeria, this achievement could augur well for rapid containment of Mali’s outbreak.” Senegal and Nigeria, which had been affected, are now Ebola-free.

“Most of these patients had symptom onset in early to mid-November, indicating ongoing chains of transmission,” WHO said in a press release that confirmed the two additional cases that brings to eight the total number of reported cases in Mali.

“With WHO support, staff from Mali’s Ministry of Health will be meeting with health officials from Guinea to discuss cross-border measures for coordinating control efforts and reducing the likelihood that additional cases will be imported from Guinea into Mali,” the UN health agency said.

The United Nations, as part of its intensified support to both the preparedness and response efforts of the Malian Government, will be opening on Wednesday an office of the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) in Bamako, the capital.

UNMEERs’ Guinea office, meanwhile, reported that community reticence in many areas remains the main obstacle to contact tracing. Ebola is spreading in the north up to the border with Mali, an area with no functioning treatment centres or transit centres.

In response to a question at the UN press briefing in Geneva, WHO Spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said the December 1 targets for treatment and burials and set by his organization in its response to Ebola would likely be reached in many places, but not in others.

UNMEER head Anthony Banbury had said in media interviews that the mission is already exceeding its 1 December targets in some areas, but that it is almost certain the targets will not be reached in all areas.

The targets are the so-called “70-70-60 plan” which aims to try to get 70 per cent of the cases isolated and treated, and 70 per cent of the deceased safely buried within 60 days from the beginning of October to 1 December.

UNMEER also reported that 150 health workers from the West African countries of from Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger and Nigeria will be trained in Accra, Ghana this week to help tackle Ebola in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

In Liberia, UNMEER said it plans have two or three of its helicopters positioned in Monrovia by next week to ensure immediate dispatch of teams and supplies to any outbreak.

And as of today, according to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), $807.5 million of the $1.5 billion Ebola response plan for West Africa was funded, which represented 54 percent of the appeal met.

Meanwhile, the UN Global Compact will convene an event in New York on December 11 in cooperation with the Ebola Private Sector Mobilization Group, a coalition of over 35 companies with major assets and operations in West Africa mobilizing business resources, to support front-line Ebola humanitarian relief efforts while also advocating for a more concerted global response to the outbreak and recovery.

Along with counterparts from the UN, governments and civil society, CEOs will gather at this event to share examples of interventions by business to support the Ebola response, identify lessons learned, explore how successes can be replicated and discuss the role of business in long-term recovery, according to the UN Global Compact.