Ebola returns to Liberia as youth succumbs
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LIBERIA announced the return of Ebola yesterday following the death of a 17-year-old boy, dealing a worrying blow to the country’s recovery three months after its last known case.
Deputy health minister Tolbert Nyensuah said the teenager had tested positive and died in Nedowian, a village beside the international airport, about an hour’s drive from the capital Monrovia.
“We are investigating the origin of this new case. We ask all Liberians and all other nationals living in Liberia to continue taking preventive measures,” he had earlier told public radio.
The case comes with the country still reeling from a nightmarish outbreak which wrecked its health service and economy and left thousands dead, just as it was recovering from more than a decade of civil war.
“Liberia now has the capacity to contain the new case, but remains vulnerable until we reach zero Ebola cases throughout the region,” UNMEER, the UN’s Ebola emergency response organization, tweeted.
Liberia had diagnosed its last victim, the wife of a cured patient, on March 20 — its only case in over a month — and the country was finally declared Ebola-free six weeks after the woman’s March 28 burial.
Nyensuah said experts had traced and quarantined anyone who may have had contact with the latest victim, without giving numbers or any further details on the patient.
Liberia’s African neighbors Guinea and Sierra Leone are both still battling the outbreak, which has killed more than 11,200 people, but the coastal Margibi County where the teenager died is much nearer Monrovia than either border.
The death follows equally disappointing news from Sierra Leone, which reported last week that the capital Freetown has suffered a fresh outbreak of Ebola, three weeks after its last case.
“The body has been buried in a safe manner, so there was a safe burial team that has been dispatched and buried the deceased person properly,” World Health Organization spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said in Geneva.
“This really shows that the surveillance system is working. This case has been picked up and has been tested even after death.”
Local media reported that the victim had fallen ill on June 21 and died three days later, although this could not immediately be confirmed.
The epidemic killed more than 4,800 Liberians before the WHO declared the outbreak over in Liberia on May 9.
But several governments and international organizations urged caution, with Washington warning the world not to forget that the outbreak was still going on in Sierra Leone and Guinea.
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