He said, the rapid cessation of the flare-up is a concrete demonstration of Liberia’s strengthened national capacity to manage Ebola outbreaks.
“We very much hope it will be the last”.
This was revealed by Dr Alex Gasasira, the WHO Representative in Liberia. MSF has invested in setting up Ebola survivor clinics in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, providing a comprehensive care package, including medical and psychosocial care and protection against stigma.
Then after being declared free for the second time in September, another teenage boy tested positive of the Ebola on the way to a 90-day period.
Mohammed Kamara, who lives in Monrovia, lost two relatives and a friend to Ebola in 2014.
For now, the World Health Organization said in a statement, “all known chains of transmission have been stopped in West Africa”.
Accordingly, the boy’s younger brother and father were also infected, but after receiving necessary care, both recovered and were released from the ETU on December 3. With no licensed treatment for the devastating disease, doctors have sometimes used blood from survivors to treat the sick, hoping its infection-fighting antibodies might help patients defeat the virus.
All three countries say that in future they will focus on early detection of Ebola and other infectious diseases.
The World Health Organisation has announced the two-year Ebola epidemic that has ravaged west Africa for two years is over, after the last affected country Liberia received the all-clear.
The virus, which can kill within five days of infection, devastated the region’s economies and ripped through communities, killing more than 11,000 people and infecting more than 28,500.
Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone “remain at high risk of additional small outbreaks of Ebola”, it said.
Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia were the hardest hit, and the ministry of health in the latter country is still conducting Ebola tests on dead bodies before burial. The WHO reported that 10 per cent of the victims were healthcare workers.
Now, the region faces its greatest public health challenge: to transform the lessons of the epidemic’s darkest days into long-term gains.
Chan and her colleague, Rick Brennan, the director of emergency risk management and humanitarian action at World Health Organization, however, caution that vigilance and security is still an important factor in assuring that another Ebola outbreak doesn’t happen, reports Science Magazine. “Although numerous global panels of experts have called for reform, there has been little movement towards fixing the broken worldwide health systems whose failure led to the problem”.
