The United Nations health agency on Saturday declared Liberia Ebola-free, hailing the “monumental” achievement in the west African country where the virus has killed more than 4,700 people.
“The outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Liberia is over,” the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement, adding that 42 days had passed since the last confirmed case was buried.
The period is twice the number of days the virus requires to incubate, and WHO hailed its eradication as an enormous development in the long crisis.
“Interruption of transmission is a monumental achievement for a country that reported the highest number of deaths in the largest, longest, and most complex outbreak since Ebola first emerged in 1976,” it said.
During the two months of peak transmission in August and September “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,” it added.
At the height of the crisis in late September Liberia was suffering more than 400 new cases a week, with uncollected and highly infectious bodies piling up in the streets of Monrovia, a sprawling, chaotic city at the best of times.
