Anthony Banbury, head of the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER), speaks during a UN General Assembly meeting on Ebola, at the UN headquarters in New York, on Nov. 13, 2014. While important progress has been made in the global fight against Ebola, senior UN officials on Thursday called for scaling-up in the overall efforts to tackle the worst outbreak of the disease. (Xinhua/Niu Xiaolei)

UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 13 (Xinhua) -- While important progress has been made in the global fight against Ebola, senior UN officials on Thursday called for scaling-up in the overall efforts to tackle the worst outbreak of the disease.

In briefing the UN General Assembly on the international community's response to Ebola, Anthony Banbury, head of the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER), stressed the devastating impact the outbreak has had on every aspect of the societies in the Ebola-hit countries.

He also underlined "significant improvements" in many of the dramatically hit areas, as well as "tremendous progress" towards the stated UN goal of managing and treating 70 percent of Ebola cases and making safe 70 percent of burials by Dec.1.

Community-level action is one of the main reasons for the progress, Banbury said.

In addition, national-led responses, in coordination with international partners, were also making a difference, he continued, noting that the governments of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea are taking a serious leadership role in driving the response.

Yet the UNMEER chief also voiced concern about the tasks that lay ahead. "Ebola is a fearsome enemy and we will not win by chasing it. We must get ahead of it," he said.

Banbury insisted when stopped by reporters after the briefing that the UN strategy against Ebola was "working," but the principal challenge facing the response efforts was that the disease had spread so much geographically.

"We need a much greater geographic dispersal and much faster mobility," he said, adding that smaller, more mobile treatment units are being deployed in remote areas in the hardest-hit countries in a bid to act quickly to prevent the spread of the deadly virus. "We do need more construction, more specialized expertise and we need more money to fund it all. We are getting there but we are not there yet."

Latest figures from the World Health Organization (WHO) report a total of 14,098 cases Ebola virus disease and 5,160 deaths. There is some evidence that case incidence is no longer increasing nationally in Guinea and Liberia, but steep increases persist in Sierra Leone, and cases of confirmed infection and deaths continue to be under-reported in this outbreak.

Echoing Banbury's call for a scaled-up, agile response to the outbreak, the Secretary-General's Special Envoy on Ebola, David Nabarro, told the UN General Assembly he was "humbled" by the efforts made in combatting the disease and reiterated his claim that Ebola remained one of the most troubling challenges that the world could face.

Nabarro cited the positive efforts made by local communities in changing the way they live and behave to reduce their likelihood of contracting the disease and said he was impressed by the " unprecedented" global response coalition which was developing and functioning as a joint community.

While opening the informal briefing, UN General Assembly President Sam Kutesa, warned that while the number of new cases was slowing down, the total number across the region still remained perilously high.

"The resounding message from those in the hardest hit areas is that while we are making encouraging progress in combatting Ebola, we have not yet won the war," Kutesa said. "We must do more to ensure that the momentum is sustained and that critical resources reach those in urgent need without delay."

The UN system has been accelerating its Ebola response, including ramped up on-the-ground medical assistance for local governments in affected areas via UNMEER; providing financial support for the countries hardest hit by the killer disease through the World Bank; and monitoring the urgent laboratory testing of an experimental Ebola vaccine which could be distributed across West Africa as early as January 2015.