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Sierra Leone announced it will implement a four-day "lockdown" across the country in an attempt to contain the spread of Ebola. The Friday move came as the World Health Organization stated that the virus has so far claimed over 2,000 lives in Africa.

Beginning September 18, the nation will prohibit residents from leaving their homes for four days, with the hopes that health officials will be able to detect early-stage cases, Ibrahim Ben Kargbo, a presidential advisor in Sierra Leone, told Reuters.

"The aggressive approach is necessary to deal with the spread of Ebola once and for all," he said.

Unfortunately, the news was accompanied by worsening statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO), which announced on Friday that out of the roughly 4,000 people that have been confirmed to have the virus, 2,105 people have died in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria.

It marked a drastic rise in the death toll - a spike of about 500 people since last week - and continued adding to what is already the most deadly Ebola epidemic since the virus was first detected in 1976.

As officials scramble to address the problem, a separate Reuters report revealed that drug companies are also trying to fast-track their efforts to bring new kinds of medicine to market. Multiple drugs have been labeled as potentially helpful by the WHO, but ZMapp, in particular, has attracted attention worldwide.

Developed by Mapp Bio pharmaceutical, ZMapp first made headlines when it was administered to two American aid workers who had contracted Ebola, both of whom were flown out of Africa and recovered from the virus soon after. The drug has been successfully given to seven individuals total, but Mapp president Dr. Larry Zeitlin said that despite the US granting over $42 million to speed up its testing, it still needs to undergo clinical trials - starting in 2015.

"The US support will enable us to figure out what the appropriate dose is and scale up manufacturing. With a drug you have not only to make it, but make it consistently to the same quality. The award given us is for 18 months. We will probably be in human trials beginning in 2015," he told Reuters.

"We don't have data indicating whether ZMapp is safe in humans, we don't have data that it works in humans. That is the whole point of performing clinical trials," he added.

Other drugs are also being tested in the hopes that a more comprehensive view of their benefits and consequences can be determined by the end of the year.

On Wednesday, WHO director general Margaret Chan said the virus has been "underestimated" by international organizations and is only getting worse.

"All international organizations underestimated the disease," she said. "The outbreak will get worse before it gets better. And it requires a well-coordinated, big surge and huge scale-up of outbreak response urgently."