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Europe must send more medical boots to West Africa and help rebuild local health systems to help tackle the outbreak of Ebola, the EU's Ebola coordinator said in an interview, according to AFP.

Christos Stylianides told AFP this week that he was in touch with European capitals to do more to counter the disease in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Mali.

Sending "as quickly as possible ready and specialized medical personnel " and "launching the reconstruction of local health systems" was the main path of action for the European Union, he said.

But he stopped short of repeating a call by a European source last week to have 5,000 doctors on stand-by, saying that the EU needed to be "flexible."

At a European level the mobilization is "satisfactory but we must not relax our efforts" said Stylianides, who recently returned from a trip to the affected region with EU health commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis.

He is due to present an EU action plan at the end of December for treating the outbreak.

According to latest figures from the World Health Organization, the Ebola outbreak has claimed 6,070 lives out of more than 17,000 infections.

"The first priority is doctors, nurses, hygienists, disease specialists," Stylianides said, adding that psychologists and social workers were also needed.

Despite military deployments by Britain in Sierra Leone and France in Guinea, as well as the United States in Liberia, the aid effort has been slow to mobilize.

Stylianides said he and Vytenis Andriukaitis asked European capitals to speed up their work.

Volunteers have been increasingly difficult to find due to the risk of contagion for medical personnel, something that the EU has tried to address by stepping up procedures for evacuating health workers.

The EU's medical evacuation system is "fully operational" with four planes on stand-by in Luxembourg and the US and nine countries ready to treat repatriated staff, he said.