US President Barack Obama has renewed calls for Congress to approve $6bn (£3.8bn) in emergency aid to fight the deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
The president made the plea on a visit to the National Institutes of Health, where he congratulated scientists on work towards a vaccine.
Nearly 7,000 people have died, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
The medical charity, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), has again strongly criticised the international response.
It described it as patchy and slow, with the job of tackling the crisis largely left to doctors, nurses and charity organisations.
The MSF report said foreign governments - notably the UK in Sierra Leone and and most recently China in Liberia - were continuing to build Ebola treatment centres.
But these were sometimes in the wrong places and they were sometimes handing over staffing to people who did not have the right expertise.
Earlier on Tuesday, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said stigma against travellers from Ebola-infected countries is hindering the fight against the disease by discouraging medics in the West from helping.
Analysis: Mark Doyle, BBC international development correspondent
Top United Nations Ebola bosses gave an upbeat press conference in Freetown, Liberia, on Monday that contrasted sharply with the new MSF report. The UN had met some of its targets, they bosses said - the situation was very bad, but moving in the right direction.
However, privately, UN officials say the country that currently has the worst Ebola hotspots, Sierra Leone, is not coping at all.
These UN officials added - still 'off the record' - that the big aid agencies, the Sierra Leone government and the British army were not 'joining the dots' and coordinating well. It was of course ironic of UN officials to say that, because the UN is supposed to be doing the coordination.
The UN, for all its bureaucratic faults, is the only overarching international body that can hope to manage the fight against Ebola in the long run. But MSF medics and Sierra Leonean health workers have, so far, done most of the dangerous work in the front lines against the viral disease.
But President Obama struck a different chord, praising the progress being made as he visited the National Institutes of Health in Maryland.
'We have seen encouraging news,' he said, pointing to declining infection rates in Liberia and $2bn pledged by the global community.
He urged Congress to give a 'good Christmas present' to the world - $6bn to 'extinguish' the disease abroad and strengthen defences against it in the US.
'We need to show the world how America leads,' he said.
Congress is currently at work on a massive spending bill, but Ebola legislation has become embroiled in ongoing political partisanship.
In November, Mr Obama requested $2bn for the United States Agency for International Development, $2.4bn for the Department of Health and Human Services, and more than $1.5bn for a contingency fund.
But conservative members of Congress are expected to challenge the proposal in response to Mr Obama's recent controversial executive actions on immigration, helping more than 4m illegal immigrants.
Meanwhile, the White House said on Tuesday the US is better prepared to deal with an outbreak of Ebola at home and has efforts to battle it in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone are further along than in months prior.
A network of 35 hospitals across the US are ready to treat Ebola patients and the number of labs used for testing the virus has increased from 13 to 42.
Nearly 200 civilians and 3,000 military personnel have also been deployed to West Africa, and three Ebola treatment units and a hospital have been created in Liberia.
Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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