'We won't get to zero cases of Ebola without a big scale-up in funding,' UN relief chief warns.

Deadly, attacks on health workers in Ebola-hit areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), including one at the weekend that left two dead, are an indication that combating the disease outbreak will require far greater international support, UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock said on Monday.

Speaking in Geneva, Mr. Lowcock, the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, insisted on the need to 'be honest with ourselves' on tackling the haemorrhagic disease ...unless there's a big scale-up in the response, we're unlikely to be successful in getting to zero cases'.

At his side, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus confirmed the attacks in Beni and the identification - for the first time - of an infected patient in Goma, a city of one million people bordering Rwanda.

According to WHO, almost 3,000 health workers have so far been vaccinated against the disease in Goma.

Insisting that he was confident sufficient preventative measures had been put in place, Mr. Tedros announced that he had decided to reconvene an Emergency Committee 'as soon as possible to assess the threat of this development and advise me accordingly'.

The two top UN officials were chairing a high-level event on the ourbreak that included the DRC Minister of Health, Dr. Oly Ilunga, the Minister for Solidarity and Humanitarian Action, Bernard Biando Sango, and the Secretary of State for International Development of the United Kingdom, the Rt. Hon. Rory Stewart, as keynote speakers.

More than 2,400 cases of infection, 1,650 deaths

Since the latest Ebola outbreak was officially declared in the eastern DRC provinces of North Kivu and Ituri last August, there have been more than 2,400 confirmed and probable cases and 1,647 deaths, according to latest data from the country's authorities.

Despite the high toll, the ongoing risk to neighbouring countries - not least Uganda, which has just overcome a recent case of DRC-originating Ebola infection - and reports that the disease has reached the large city of Goma for the first time via an infected pastor, Mr. Lowcock noted that 'just a small fraction' of the $2 billion fund to tackle the 2014-16 West Africa Ebola outbreak has been made available to date.

The UN official also credited MONUSCO, the UN peacekeeping mission in DRC, for facilitating the work of health teams tasked with tracing potential Ebola patients, in areas prone to attack by armed groups, in an appeal for greater political and...