Ebola Case Detected in Sierra Leone

The body of the 22-year-old woman tested positive for the virus in Sierra Leone, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said today.

A aid agency report says a woman who died of Ebola in Sierra Leone this week has potentially exposed at least twenty-seven other people to the virus.

Authorities in Sierra Leone are tracing her contacts and have dispatched teams to the area for investigations.

Liberia was the last country previously to be declared Ebola-free. The vast majority of Ebola deaths have been concentrated in Liberia (4,809), Sierra Leone (3,955) and Guinea (2,536), according to recent statistics from the WHO.

Even as WHO declared West Africa free of the disease on Thursday, health officials said that it was likely for flare-ups to persist although they would become less frequent over time. Sierra Leone had been declared Ebola-free on November 7 and Guinea on December 29.

In the earlier World Health Organization announcement, Director-General Margaret Chan said that the work of combating Ebola was not yet done and vigilance would be necessary to prevent new outbreaks.

Medecins San Frontieres, or “Doctors Without Walls”, an independent medical organization who, according to BBC, was the first to warn the public about Ebola’s dangers, said that the day of declaration was marked as a day of rejoicing.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, who heads WHO’s Ebola response efforts, said the woman was not buried safely because local health workers had not identified her as a suspected Ebola case.

Researchers are still learning about Ebola, which has been found to survive in people for nine months or more.

Furthermore, scientific proofs state patients can be cured of Ebola, but the virus lives on in the semen of some male survivors for as long as a year, and there have been one or two cases where patients transmitted the disease sexually to their wives. A country is regarded as Ebola-free when two 21-day incubation periods have passed since the last known case received a negative second test. Countries are then placed on a 90-day heightened surveillance.

People pass a banner reading “STOP EBOLA” forming part of Sierra Leone’s Ebola free campaign in the city of Freetown, Sierra Leone, Friday, Jan. 15, 2016.