MONROVIA, Liberia: One of Liberia’s most high-profile doctors has died of Ebola, a government official said Sunday, highlighting the risks facing health workers trying to combat the deadly disease.

Dr. Samuel Brisbane is the first Liberian doctor to die in an outbreak the World Health Organization says has killed 129 people in the West African nation. A Ugandan doctor working in the country died earlier this month.

The WHO says the outbreak, the largest ever recorded, has also killed 319 people in Guinea and 224 in Sierra Leone.

Brisbane, who once served as a medical adviser to former Liberian President Charles Taylor, was working as a consultant with the internal medicine unit at the country’s largest hospital, the John F. Kennedy Memorial Medical Center in Monrovia.

After falling ill with Ebola, he was taken to a treatment center on the outskirts of the capital, where he died, said Tolbert Nyenswah, an assistant health minister.

Under the supervision of health workers, family members escorted the doctor’s body to a burial location west of the city, Nyenswah said.

He added that another doctor who had been working in Liberia’s central Bong County was also being treated for Ebola at the same center where Brisbane died.

The situation “is getting more and more scary,” Nyenswah said.

News of Brisbane’s death first began circulating on Saturday, a national holiday marking Liberia’s independence in 1847.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf used her Independence Day address to discuss a new taskforce to combat Ebola. Information Minister Lewis Brown said the taskforce would go “from community to community, from village to village, from town to town” in order to increase awareness.

Health workers are at serious risk of contracting the disease, which spreads through contact with bodily fluids.

An American doctor battling West Africa’s Ebola epidemic has himself fallen sick with the disease in Liberia, his aid agency said.

Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian charity, said Dr. Kent Brantly had been isolated at the group’s Ebola treatment center at the ELWA hospital in the Liberian capital Monrovia.

“Dr. Brantly is married with two children,” the group said, in a statement posted to its website on Saturday. “Samaritan’s Purse is committed to doing everything possible to help Dr. Brantly during this time of crisis. We ask everyone to please pray for him and his family.”

Brantly is the medical director of the Samaritan’s Purse Ebola case management center in Liberia, where the agency continues to work with Liberian and international health officials to contain the outbreak.

There is no known cure for Ebola, which begins with symptoms including fever and sore throat but then escalates to vomiting, diarrhea and internal and external bleeding.

Meanwhile, a Sierra Leone Ebola patient whose family sparked a nationwide hunt when they forcefully removed her from a treatment center and took her to a traditional healer, died in an ambulance on the way to hospital, a health official said.

Health officials say fear and mistrust of health workers in Sierra Leone, where many have more faith in traditional medicine, are hindering efforts to contain an Ebola outbreak, which has killed more than 450 people in the country.

In recent days crowds gathered outside clinics and hospitals to protest against what they see as a conspiracy, in some cases clashing with police as they threatened to burn down the buildings and remove the patients.

Amadu Sisi, a senior doctor at King Harman hospital in the capital Freetown, from which the patient was taken, said on Saturday that police found her in the house of a healer.

Her family refused to hand her over and a struggle ensued with police, who finally retrieved her and sent her to hospital, he said.

“She died in the ambulance on the way to another hospital,” Sisi said. Across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, at least 660 people have died from the worst outbreak yet of the haemorrhagic fever, the World Health Organization (WHO) said, placing great strain on the health systems of some of Africa’s poorest countries.

The virus is still spreading. A 33-year-old American doctor working for relief organization Samaritan’s Purse in Liberia tested positive for the disease on Saturday. In Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, a Liberian man who tested positive died in on Friday.