Less than a month after it lifted all restrictions on movement, Sierra Leone placed 700 homes under Ebola quarantine on Friday. All of them are in Aberdeen, a fishing and tourist district of the capital Freetown.

"There was a sudden spike in the number of cases. It's effectively a quarantine there which would typically last 21 days," said Obi Sisay, director of the situation room in the National Ebola Response Center.

The center's most recent data showed six new confirmed cases of Ebola in Aberdeen on Wednesday. Sisay estimated that there were up to 2,000 people in Aberdeen who had potentially come into contact with individuals infected with Ebola.

During the Ebola epidemic that has raged in West Africa for more than a year, more than 9,100 people have died, including 3,300 people in Sierra Leone.

At the end of January, President Ernest Bai Koroma declared there was "a steady downward trend" in new cases and lifted the country-wide quarantines that had affected about half of Sierra Leone's population.

However, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported on Wednesday the number of new cases rising across Sierra Leone and neighboring Guinea.

The deadly Ebola virus is spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person.

das/sms (Reuters, AFP)