 |
|
A man walks past an Ebola campaign banner with the new
slogan 'Ebola Must GO' in Monrovia on February 23, 2015 ©Zoom Dosso (AFP)
|
The
UN health agency on Saturday declared Liberia Ebola-free, hailing the
"monumental" achievement in the West African country where the virus
has killed more than 4,700 people.
The World Health Organization declared Liberia free of
Ebola on Saturday, making it the first of the three hardest-hit West African
countries to bring a formal end to the epidemic.
"The outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Liberia
is over," the World Health Organization said in a statement, adding that
42 days had passed since the last confirmed case was buried.
"Interruption of transmission is a monumental
achievement for a country that reported the highest number of deaths in the
largest, longest, and most complex outbreak since Ebola first emerged in
1976," it said.
During the two months of peak transmission in August
and September "the capital city Monrovia was the setting for some of the
most tragic scenes from West Africa’s outbreak: gates locked at overflowing
treatment centres, patients dying on the hospital grounds, and bodies that were
sometimes not collected for days", it added.
"At one point, virtually no treatment beds for
Ebola patients were available anywhere in the country.
"It is a tribute to the government and people of
Liberia that determination to defeat Ebola never wavered, courage never faltered."
At the same time, WHO warned that because Ebola
outbreaks were continuing in neighbouring Guinea and Sierra Leone, there was a
high risk that infected people could cross into Liberia.
Liberia Is Free of Ebola, World Health
Organization Declares
The president
of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, planned to attend ceremonies later in the
morning to commemorate the dead and celebrate survivors.
As of Saturday, two maximum incubation periods of the
virus, a total of 42 days, had passed since the burial of the last person
confirmed to have had Ebola in Liberia, fulfilling the official criteria for
concluding that human-to-human transmission of the virus has ended. According to
the W.H.O., there were more than 3,000 confirmed Ebola cases in Liberia, and a
further 7,400 suspected or probable cases, with more than 4,700 deaths
estimated to have occurred since the outbreak was declared there in March of
2014. Among the dead were 189 health care workers.
“I’m particularly struck by the significant progress
we have made as a country and as a people,” Tolbert Nyenswah, a senior Liberian
health official who heads the country’s Ebola response efforts, said Thursday
in an interview. The end of the epidemic was, he said, “a victory for Liberia
and Liberians. The only caution is that our subregion is not free yet, and we
are very much concerned about Guinea and Sierra Leone.”
Last week those countries, which share borders with
Liberia, each reported nine cases of the disease, the lowest weekly total this
year. Mr. Nyenswah said Liberia would continue many of the control measures
that helped the country vanquish the epidemic, including surveying border areas
for sick travellers, testing all dead bodies for the virus and conducting
burials with specially trained teams wearing full protective gear.
“We are being extremely cautious,” Dr. Bernice Dahn,
the country’s incoming health minister, said Friday in an email. She added that
the country’s priority now is to build its critically deficient health care
workforce to provide Liberians with a higher standard of care and help guard
against future outbreaks. “Ebola highlighted our health system’s weaknesses,”
she said.
A key question for Liberians is whether the end of the
outbreak will draw foreign companies back to the country, whose economy has
been battered. British Airways, for instance, which came under fire from aid
officials after it and several other airlines stopped flying to Liberia and
Sierra Leone last August, has not resumed services.
“We keep our global route network under constant
review and always take a range of factors into account before we make any
changes,” a spokeswoman for the airline said Friday in an email. Kenya Airways
restored flights to Liberia several weeks ago. Only Brussels Air and Royal Air
Maroc, the Moroccan national carrier, continued commercial air service to the
country during the epidemic.
Last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention stopped advising U.S. residents to avoid nonessential travel to
Liberia, instead recommending that they “practice enhanced precautions” when
going there.
“The country
can get back to business,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the C.D.C., said
Friday in an interview. “It’s a tribute to the enormous hard work done by
Liberians, by the C.D.C., by partners throughout the U.S. government and the
international community.”
For the time being, however, travellers from Liberia
to the United States will still be subject to a 21-day monitoring program.
“That’s something we’ll be discussing in the coming days with other parts of
the U.S. government,” Dr. Frieden said.
The W.H.O. has recommended that Liberia maintain an
additional three months of “heightened surveillance” for Ebola due to the
ongoing outbreak in its neighbouring countries, as well as the possibility that
Ebola could re-emerge via sexual transmission from survivors.
On Friday, the W.H.O. revised its guidelines for
survivors, urging men and their partners to abstain from sex or practice safe
sex for at least six months or until two semen tests have been negative for
traces of the virus. That advice follows recent scientific evidence suggesting
that the last patient to fall ill and die of Ebola in Liberia may have caught
the virus from her boyfriend many months after his recovery. Studies have shown
that Ebola can persist in semen for some time, even after a man has completely
recovered and poses no risk to the general public; studies of the phenomenon
are planned.
The origins of the outbreak in West Africa remain
undetermined, and some scientists believe Ebola is likely to be circulating in
wildlife in the region. According to the W.H.O., four of six countries that
suffered previous Ebola epidemics had a recurrence of the disease within three
years.
There are signs that some hygienic habits that were
adopted during the epidemic may be sustained in Liberia, including handwashing
programs at schools. “That practice should become a way of life for us,” said
Iris Martor, a nurse and the program director for the non-profit organization
More than Me, which runs an academy for girls in the West Point slum area of
Monrovia. “If we forget ourselves and go back to the careless way of life,
there could be another outbreak,” Ms. Martor added.
One of Ms. Martor’s students, Benetter Kun, 18, is the
daughter of Liberia’s last Ebola patient, Ruth Tugbah, who died at a treatment
unit in late March. For Ms. Kun, as with many family members who lost loved
ones, the end of the epidemic was bittersweet.
“It’s a sad moment for me
and my family because we are not complete,” she said.
No comments:
Post a Comment