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Monrovia -Liberia has warned it may slip back to civil war along with neighboring Sierra Leone if the Ebola epidemic ravaging west Africa is allowed to continue to spread.
Information Minister Lewis Brown said the lack of urgency in the international response risked allowing a breakdown of societies in the region, where the outbreak has claimed almost 3 000 lives.
"Hospitals are struggling, but so too are hotels. Businesses are struggling. If this continues the cost of living will go to the roof. You have an agitated population," Information Minister Lewis Brown told AFP late Monday.
"The world cannot wait for Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, to slip back into conflict, which could be the result of this slowness in response."

More than 3 000 people have been infected in Liberia and almost 1 600 people have died, with health workers turning away people from treatment units due to chronic shortages of beds and staff.
Sierra Leone, where more than 1 800 have been infected and nearly 600 have died, said Monday it had "an overflow of bodies", after a controversial nationwide lockdown helped uncover more than 200 new cases.
The World Health Organization warned on Tuesday that the number of Ebola infections will triple to 20,000 by November, soaring by thousands every week if efforts to stop the outbreak are not stepped up radically.
Liberia has spent a decade recovering from two ruinous back-to-back civil wars which ran from 1989 to 2003, leaving a quarter of a million people dead and the economy in tatters.

Ebola threatening societySierra Leone, along with Liberia one of the world's poorest countries where half the population lives on less than $1.25 (0.97 euros) a day, is still struggling to recover from its own linked 11-year civil war which ended in 2002.
Guinea, where more than 600 have died, has not suffered civil war but has been plagued by deadly civil unrest in recent years between supporters of President Alpha Conde and the opposition.
"The effect of Ebola is being seen not just as a public health situation but it is also a political situation. Liberia is just ten years out of our conflict," said Brown.

"We are just in the 11th year since we started rebuilding our capacity to live together. This Ebola is threatening that capacity."
Liberia announced on Sunday a four-fold increase in hospital beds to 1,000 for patients in the capital Monrovia by the end of October.
But Brown told AFP the government needed 1,000 beds in ten Ebola treatment units across the country "immediately", and didn't have the cash.
"That is what is lowering public confidence in this fight (and) as a government, we simply cannot afford for our people to have dwindling confidence in our government to respond," he said.
"That is why we are urging the international community to assist us.
"If the population continues to see... that we are beyond our resource capacity to respond the way we would like to respond, it creates a sense of anxiety which can translate into urgency on the part of the population."

he number of Ebola infections will triple to 20 000 by November, soaring by the thousands every week if efforts are not significantly stepped up to stop the outbreak, the WHO warned on Tuesday.
"Without drastic improvements in control measures, the numbers of cases of and deaths from Ebola are expected to continue increasing from hundreds to thousands per week in the coming months", the World Health Organisation said in a study.
The current outbreak in West Africa has already claimed more than 2 800 lives and infected more than 5 800 people.
But the WHO study forecasts that if no significant action is taken, "the cumulative number of confirmed and probable cases by November 2 will be 5 925 in Guinea, 9 939 in Liberia and 5 063 in Sierra Leone".
The total for those three countries alone will therefore surpass 20 000 cases, said the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Tuesday.
That would also translate to a jump in the number of deaths as the experts suggest that the fatality in the current outbreak is much higher than the widely estimated one in two.
If only cases of deaths and recovery were taken into account, the fatality rate stands at about 71%, the study showed.
"We are seeing exponential growth and we need to act now", said Christopher Dye, co-author of the study jointly carried out with the Imperial College in London.
"If we don't stop the epidemic very soon, this is going to turn from a disaster into a catastrophe", he told reporters in Geneva, warning that the epidemic might simply "rumble on as it has for the last few months for the next few years."
"The fear is that Ebola will become more or less a permanent feature of the human population," warned Dye, who is the UN health agency's head of strategy.
'Mobile populations'
Ebola fever can fell its victims within days, causing severe muscle pain, vomiting, diarrhoea and, in many cases unstoppable internal and external bleeding.
It is one of the deadliest viruses known to man, and the current outbreak, which quietly began in southern Guinea last December, has by far killed more than all other Ebola outbreaks combined.
Prior to the current epidemic, the deadliest outbreak was the very first one on record, in Democratic Republic of Congo in 1976, when 280 people died.
But Dye said the virus ravaging West Africa was acting similarly to previous outbreaks.
What has changed is the increasing mobility of the population affected.
"These are large, highly mobile, well-interconnected populations", he said.
Cultural practices like washing and touching dead bodies have compounded the problem, leading to the widespread contagion of the virus, which is transmitted by body fluids contact.
The very slow response in countries never before hit by the virus as well as by the international community had also allowed the virus to take hold, he said.
Christl Donnelly, a professor of statistical epidemiology at the Imperial College, who co-authored the study also pointed to the weak health systems in the three hardest-hit countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
"In Nigeria, for example, where health systems are stronger, the number of cases has so far been limited, despite the introduction of infection into the large cities of Lagos and Port Harcourt", she said.

An audio recording has surfaced of the founder of the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN), TB Joshua allegedly telling reporters how to frame the building collapse story after offering them N50 000, Daily Post reports.

The prophet was said to have told the journalists that the money was meant to fuel their cars after rescue operations ended at the site of the collapsed six-storey building owned by the Synagogue Church of all Nations.

Listen to the audio - https://audioboo.fm/boos/2496625-audio-proof

The National Emergency Management Agency and the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency announced that a total of 131 people were rescued while 80 bodies were recovered from the site.

Some of those rescued alive, according to them, have been discharged, while others are still receiving treatments for various degrees of injuries at some hospitals in Lagos.

Joshua on Sunday said he would travel to South Africa in the coming weeks to meet families and survivors of a building collapse at his church that killed

President Goodluck Jonathan on Saturday visited the collapsed guesthouse at a mega-church in Lagos, promising to investigate the cause of the tragedy as the death toll hit 86, rescuers said on Saturday.
"The president came to the church this morning to see things for himself. He met with Prophet TB Joshua and expressed his condolences to the bereaved families," Ibrahim Farinloye of the National Emergency Management Agency told AFP.
He said Jonathan promised to investigate the cause of the September 12 collapse of the guesthouse at Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN) which left scores trapped in the debris.


Farinloye said the death toll now stood at 86 as against the previous figure of 84 after the various emergency teams involved in the operation had reconciled their figures.
"You are aware that several rescue teams at the state and federal levels were involved in the operations. We sat together and reconciled our figures which has now brought the death toll to 86. But those rescued still stands at 131," he said.
Farinloye could not say if the new death toll included 84 South Africans who had been confirmed dead in the incident by the country's high commissioner to Nigeria Lulu Mnguni.
It is believed that there were 349 South Africans visiting the popular church in the Ikotun district of the city at the time of the collapse.

The church's leader Joshua, who has blamed the incident on sabotage, is one of most well-known Pentecostal preachers and is referred to by followers across the world as "The Prophet" or "The Man of God".
He claims to work miracles, including raising people from the dead and healing the sick, and foreseeing disasters.
The Lagos state government has accused the church of adding extra floors to the existing structure without approval.
It has ordered urgent structural integrity tests on all buildings in the sprawling compound, including the main church, which Joshua says was designed by the Holy Spirit.