Nigeria confirmed five new cases of Ebola in Lagos and a second death from the virus on Wednesday, bringing the total number of infections in sub-Saharan Africa's largest city to seven.

"Nigeria has now recorded seven confirmed cases of Ebola virus disease," Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said.

Those who have died include the "index patient," a Liberian who brought the virus to Lagos on July 20, and a nurse who treated him, the minister added.

"All the Nigerians diagnosed with EBV were primary contacts" of Patrick Sawyer, who worked for Liberia's finance ministry and contracted the virus from his sister, Chukwu said.

He traveled to Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, for a meeting of West African officials.

Three of the world's leading Ebola specialists have called for experimental drugs and vaccines to be offered to people in West Africa, where a vast outbreak of the deadly disease is raging in three countries, Al-Jazeera reported.

Noting that the US aid workers who contracted the disease in Liberia were given an unapproved medicine before being evacuated back to the United States, the specialists - including Peter Piot, who codiscovered Ebola in 1976 - said Africans affected by the same outbreak should get the same chance.

Piot, David Heymann and Jeremy Farrar, all influential infectious-disease professors, said there were several antiviral drugs, monoclonal antibodies and vaccines under study for possible use against Ebola.

The five Ebola patients are being treated in an isolation ward in Lagos, the minister told journalists.

AFP - Reuters - Xinhua

(China Daily 08/07/2014 page12)