Zee Media Bureau
New Delhi: The World Health Organization (WHO) on Saturday declared Liberia free from the deadly Ebola virus. The country has not had a single confirmed case of Ebola from the past 42 days.
The last confirmed death was on 27 March, 2015. Since September 2014, Liberia was seeing 400 cases of the deadly disease in a week.
In order to stem the epidemic, a public health campaign was also launched. The deadly disease has claimed over 11,000 lives in the region, and remains active in Guinea and Sierra Leone.
WHO will regard a country Ebola-free, if there is no new case of the deadly disease in 42-day period, that is twice the number of maximum incubation period.
Liberia has seen the most deaths because of Ebola out of all the African countries.
Ebola care centres and hand washing station have been set up with international help to try to halt the disease, which is spreading through contact with the sick people.
“We can’t take our foot off the gas until all three countries record 42 days with no cases,” Mariateresa Cacciapuoti, MSF’s head of mission in Liberia, said in a statement.
She urged Liberia to step up cross-border surveillance to prevent Ebola slipping back into the country.
The UN Special Envoy on Ebola, David Nabarro, said this week that Liberian authorities had pledged to maintain heightened surveillance for at least a year after being declared Ebola-free on Saturday.
Nabarro suggested that, even though fewer than 20 new cases were reported in Guinea and Sierra Leone last week, it could take months to get to zero.
International aid organisations were forced to step in as the Ebola outbreak ravaged the region`s poorly equipped and understaffed healthcare systems.
MSF, which was highly critical of the slow response by the United Nations and western governments, opened the world’s largest Ebola management centre in Monrovia, with a capacity of 400 beds.
According to the WHO, a total of 868 health workers have caught the virus in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone since the start of the outbreak, of whom 507 died.
International Medical Corps (IMC), a charity that ran two Ebola clinics in Liberia, appealed for international support in rebuilding the healthcare system there in the wake of the virus.
"Now is the time to build on the momentum we have generated to strengthen the Liberian health system,” Anouk Boschma, IMC`s acting country director in Liberia, said in a statement.
(With Agency inputs)
