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GRAPHITTI NEWS
reports Liberian health authorities have identified 102 people who were in
contact with the boy, a number that is expected to increase.
Over the weekend, a
17-year-old boy died in a small town outside the Liberian capital of Monrovia, The New York Times reports.
His family had the burial team swab his body to test for the virus. The tests
came back positive, as did a blood test taken by an Ebola response team on
Tuesday. According to The Times,
a clinic initially diagnosed the boy with malaria, which has
similar symptoms to the early stages of Ebola.
Agence France-Presse
reports that two more patients have tested positive for the disease, and
according to the WHO’s latest situation report, health authorities have
identified 102 people who were in contact with the boy, a number that is
“expected to increase as investigations continue.”
Even when the outbreak
fizzled out in Liberia, neighboring Guinea and Sierra Leone have continued to
see 20 to 27 cases a week since late May, according to the WHO. There have been
more than 11,000 total deaths from the outbreak since it began in March 2014.
Right now it’s unclear
how the boy got infected—he reportedly had not been to Guinea or Sierra Leone,
nor is he thought to have been in contact with anyone visiting from those
countries, making it all the more mysterious how the virus found a foothold
again in Liberia.
The Centres for Disease
Control and Prevention said in a statement that the agency is “on the ground
with the Liberia Ministry of Health and others working to understand the origin
of the reported case of Ebola and stopping spread to others.”
When Ebola first came to
Liberia, it overwhelmed the country’s thinly spread health system. Only 170
doctors lived in the country before the outbreak, according to The Wall Street Journal, many of whom weren’t
practicing. Protective equipment was sorely lacking, and “few medical staff had
been trained in the basic principles of infection prevention and control,”
allowing the disease to spread through hospitals and healthcare facilities.
West Africa had never seen an Ebola outbreak before, and many people were
fearful and distrusting of health workers, and loath to stop traditional burial
practices, which included the washing of dead bodies.
But according to the WHO,
cases began to decline in the fall of 2014 in Lofa County, which had been one
of the epicenters of the disease, and in Monrovia. The WHO credits the eventual
eradication of Ebola in Liberia to the leadership of President Ellen Sirleaf,
who went on field visits and coordinated the response efforts from
international partners, and to “community engagement, acceptance, and ownership
of the response.” For example, Liberia’s National Incident Management System
divided the country’s largest county, Montserrado, into sectors, and had locals
work with health officials to track Ebola cases and educate people in their own
communities.
“Intensification of technical interventions,
like increased laboratory capacity, more treatment beds, and a larger number of
contact tracing and burial teams, will not bend the curve in the absence of
community engagement and ownership,” the WHO wrote in its January 2015 report,
one year into the epidemic.
Since the epidemic began,
there’s been significant training of healthcare workers, and new procedures
implemented at hospitals. In April, Liberia put forth an Ebola Recovery Plan that includes the goal of improving health delivery, especially in rural areas.
However, the plan costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and Ebola hit
Liberia’s economy hard, meaning that a lot of that money will have to come from
elsewhere.
“There’s a lot we don’t
know yet, and this is a reminder of how hard it can be to control Ebola,” the
CDC said in a statement. “Liberia is in a much better place to do that today
than a year ago.”
The hope is that now that
Ebola is a known quantity—albeit a no less dangerous one. Liberia should be
better prepared to deal with it this time around.
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