The World Health Organization said Monday the death toll from the Ebola epidemic in west Africa has now reached 887 after 61 more fatalities recorded at the end of last week.

Giving an update on the deadly virus -- the worst Ebola outbreak ever -- the U.N. health agency said the 61 deaths were reported between last Thursday and Friday in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

With 20,000 citizens living in three countries affected by an Ebola outbreak, Lebanon is taking a series of measures to prevent the virus reaching its shores, government officials said Friday.

Health Minister Wael Abu Faour, during a tour of Beirut airport, said the ministry "has asked all airlines, particularly those bringing people from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, to inform Lebanese authorities about anyone displaying suspicious symptoms."

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.

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.

In a hospital in the Guinean capital Conakry, a doctor can barely conceal his anger over the Ebola crisis sweeping the country and the officials who once made hopeful pronouncements about the end of the outbreak.

"They lied, so our partners, and even the local population, put down their guard. And this is the result -- the epidemic has spread throughout the country," says Dr Alphadio from the Donka hospital.

Former Liberian president Charles Taylor has formally applied to serve the rest of his jail term for war crimes in Rwanda, saying his imprisonment in Britain breaches his human rights, his lawyer said Thursday.

Taylor was jailed for 50 years in 2012 on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity over acts committed by Sierra Leonean rebels he aided and abetted during the brutal 1991-2001 civil war.

Two-thirds of rape victims in Liberia last year were children, the government said on Tuesday, in an alarming statement revealing that ten under-14s had died as a result of their injuries.

Ministers said 65 percent of the 1,002 cases reported in 2013 concerned victims aged between three and 14, yet just 137 cases came to court with only 49 rapists convicted.

The family of former Liberian warlord Charles Taylor said Tuesday that he is being ill-treated in the British jail where he is serving his 50-year war crimes sentence, but Britain dismissed the allegations as "utter nonsense."

Taylor family spokesman Sando Johnson told a press conference in Liberia's capital Monrovia that prison officers were withholding food and water from the 65-year-old former president, who arrived at a British jail two weeks ago.

Liberia's ex-warlord Charles Taylor was on Tuesday transferred from The Hague to a British prison to serve his 50-year sentence for war crimes, the Special Court for Sierra Leone said.

"Charles Ghankay Taylor... was transferred today from the Netherlands and the custody of the Special Court to the United Kingdom, where he will serve the remainder of his 50-year sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity," the SCSL' Freetown office said in a statement.

A U.N.-backed appeals court on Thursday upheld Liberian ex-president and warlord Charles Taylor's 50-year sentence for arming rebels during Sierra Leone's brutal 1990s civil war.

"The appeals chamber... affirms the sentence of 50 years in prison and orders that the sentence be imposed immediately," judge George King told the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) in The Hague.