Health officials in Guinea battled to contain West Africa's first outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus as neighboring Liberia reported its first suspected victims and a traveller returning to Canada was hospitalized with suspicious symptoms.

At least 59 people are known to have died in Guinea's southern forests and there are six suspected cases in Liberia which, if confirmed, would mark the spread of the highly contagious pathogen into another country.

And there are fears the virus may have crossed continents, with a man returning to Canada from Liberia seriously ill in hospital after experiencing symptoms consistent with the virus, health officials said.

"As of this morning six cases have been reported of which five have already died - four female adults and one male child. One of the suspected cases, a female child, is under treatment," Liberian Health Minister Walter Gwenigale said in a statement.

"The team is already investigating the situation, tracing contacts, collecting blood samples and sensitizing local health authorities on the disease," he added.

The local health ministry in Canada's Saskatchewan province said a man had been placed in solitary confinement, with his family in quarantine, pending expected results on Tuesday of tests.

"All we know at this point is that we have a person who is critically ill who travelled from a country where these diseases occur," Denise Werker, joint director of health in Saskatchewan, in western Canada, said.

To date, no treatment or vaccine is available for the Ebola pathogen, which kills between 25 and 90 percent of those who fall sick, depending on the strain of the virus, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Officials from the Guinean health ministry and the WHO met Sunday in Conakry for urgent talks on the crisis.

"The total suspect cases recorded to date amount to 86 cases with 59 deaths," the health ministry said in a statement, indicating that most cases reported since the start of the outbreak in early February were in Guinea's south.

The first analyses of samples by the Pasteur Institute in the French city of Lyon showed that cases in southern Guinea were due to the Ebola virus.

Three cases of hemorrhagic fever, two fatal, have also been reported in Conakry, but tests for Ebola proved negative.

Transmission to humans can come from wild animals, or from direct contact from another human's blood, feces or sweat, or by sexual contact and the unprotected handling of contaminated corpses.

The tropical virus can fell its victims within days, causing severe fever and muscle pain, weakness, vomiting and diarrhoea - in some cases shutting down organs and causing unstoppable bleeding.

AFP