World Health Organization declares end of Ebola breakout in Liberia

The UN body says “all known chains of transmission have been stopped in West Africa”, adding that the job is not over, more flare-ups are expected and that strong surveillance and response systems will be critical in the months to come.

Today’s declaration that Liberia is free of Ebola transmissions, having completed a 42-day period without a case of the disease, follows Guinea’s declaration in December and Sierra Leone’s in November.

“People of course want to return to a normal, but it’s a new normal”, said Peter Graaff, a World Health Organization director who is in charge of Ebola response. During this time, World Health Organization will continue to support the effort to prevent the disease from resurfacing and will respond if that were to happen.

It comes after officials declared Liberia Ebola-free on Thursday. Ten such flare-ups have been reported across the three countries in the last nine months: four in Liberia, three in Guinea, and three in Sierra Leone. The new cases had occurred on average 27 days apart, but there have been none since mid-November.

The biggest threat for a new Ebola outbreak at the moment is that the virus can remain in certain bodily fluids – particularly the semen of male survivors – up to a year after they are disease and symptom-free.

More than 42 days passed since the last case in Liberia, marking the end of the outbreak that killed more than 11,000 people. There have been 10 such flare-ups at the end of the outbreak, due largely to the persistence of the virus in survivors. All of the more than 165 contacts were identified and closely monitored, but no new infections were detected.

“We’ve been humbled by this virus multiple times during this outbreak, so I think we need to be cautious”, said Dr. William A. Fischer II, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina who has been working with Ebola survivors. “A massive effort is underway to ensure robust prevention, surveillance and response capacity across all three countries by the end of March”, Aylward said. The disease wrought devastation to families, communities and the health and economic systems of all three countries.

Now that the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa has officially come to a close, not all of the stocks that rallied from the introduction of the virus to USA soil have completely petered out.

Doctors without Borders (MSF), the first aid group to arrive on the scene and play an instrumental role in warning the world about the emerging outbreak, called on the global community to draw on the lessons learned in the Ebola outbreak to better prepare for future outbreaks.