Liberia to get third Ebola-free declaration

The World Health Organization is expected to declare Liberia Ebola-freed this Friday, January 15, which will be third since the epidemic hit the country in 2014 with devastated human casualties.

A W.H.O. release posted in Geneva, says the two-year Ebola epidemic which laid waste to communities across west Africa and killed more than 11,000 people is due to be declared over Friday with Liberia expecting the all-clear.

Liberia, hardest hit in the outbreak with 4,800 deaths, discharged its last two cases — the father and younger brother of a 15-year-old victim — on December 3, 2015. The patients’ recovery triggered a 42-day countdown — twice the incubation period of the virus, which countdown has been completed ahead of Friday’s declaration by W.H.O. Ebola can fell its victims within days, causing severe fever and muscle pain, weakness, vomiting and diarrhoea. In many cases it shuts down organs and causes unstoppable bleeding.

The virus is spread through close contact with the sweat, vomit, blood or other bodily fluids of an infected person, or the recently deceased. “We are hopeful that Liberia will once more be declared Ebola free by the World Health Organization, as we are getting closer to the day,” the release quotes Liberia’s chief medical officer Dr. Francis Karteh, as saying.

“We will remain careful and keep calling on the population to take the necessary measures in preventing reoccurrence.” Liberia was first declared free of human-to-human transmission in May, only to see the fever resurface six weeks later. It was officially credited with beating the epidemic for a second time in September before another small cluster of cases emerged.

The virus spread aggressively from “patient zero”, a Guinean infant who became the first victim, into Liberia and then Sierra Leone, quickly notching up more deaths than all other outbreaks combined.WHO release