Ebola fighters TIME's person of 2014

Washington: The TIME magazine has announced its decision to honour the "unprecedented numbers" of doctors and nurses, who responded when Ebola hit an already-weak public health infrastructure, as "Time's Person of the Year."

Terming the epidemic a "war and a warning," Editor Nancy Gibbs explained how the governments were poorly equipped to respond to the outbreak, the World Health Organisation (WHO) was in denial and "snarled in red tape" and the first responders were accused of "crying wolf as the disease spread," reported the CNN.

She added that the world could sleep at night because a group of men and women were willing to stand up and fight. "For tireless acts of courage and mercy, for buying the world time to boost its defenses, for risking, for persisting, for sacrificing and saving, the Ebola fighters are Time's 2014 Person of the Year," she said.

The TIME magazine's cover will feature five Ebola fighters including, 37-year-old ambulance driver, Foday Gallah, who contracted Ebola while trying to comfort an infected child, Dr. Jerry Brown, a Liberian surgeon who converted his hospital's chapel into one of the country's first treatment centers, Salome Karwah, an Ebola survivor who lost both parents to the disease and undertook the task of counseling patients in Liberia, Ella Watson-Stryker, a Doctors Without Borders health promoter and Dr. Kent Brantly who became the first American to contract Ebola while running a treatment center in Monrovia.

According to WHO estimates, about 6,300 people were killed in the epidemic in West Africa. Almost 11,000 confirmed cases of Ebola have been reported in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone while, 6,000 suspected and probable cases loom, the UN agency said.