Liberia quarantines community where corpse tested for Ebola

Liberia was in fact reported lacking Ebola few weeks ago, implementing the most lethal breakout inside of the disease’s historical past.

The news that a 17-year-old man has died of Ebola in Liberia is deeply troubling.

Tolbert Nyensuah the deputy health minister said that the new case of the deadly virus was reported in Margibi County.

The World Health Organization declared Liberia free of the Ebola virus on May 9, after 42 days with no new cases reported.

Specimens were taken from the corpse before burial, and the tests later came back positive. “But our surveillance teams, our capacity is very strong”. Although the people rejoiced when the country was declared Ebola-free, their mindset still includes their continued increased risk as long as neighboring Sierra Leone and Guinea remains infected, she said. Authorities have not yet discovered where the latest victim contracted the virus and are now investigating his contacts to find where he could have encountered Ebola.

Liberia has been Ebola free for the last two months, but now with the discovery of a corpse of a 17-year-old boy who died of Ebola, panic has spread through West Africa in fear of another outbreak.

During those two months, 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. “There is no known source of infection and there’s no information about him traveling to Guinea or SL”, a spokesperson for the ministry of health wrote in an email.

Around 43 per cent of those deaths were in Liberia, where the world’s worst outbreak of the disease peaked between last August and October with hundreds of cases a week.

Liberia had been hardest hit with more than 4,800 deaths out of a total of more than 11,000 fatalities.

Nyenswah said the health ministry expects to have a list of the young man’s contacts by the end of the day Tuesday. The new cases are in Kambia, and Port Loko in the North with 2 cases in Freetown.

But an aggressive public-awareness campaign persuaded Liberians to embrace preventative measures that slowed Ebola’s spread, like washing their hands with chlorinated water and avoiding shaking hands.