The World Health Organization announced that Liberia was Ebola free on May 9 and the population celebrated all day long.
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If there are no further cases, it will take another 42 days to declare Liberia free of Ebola again, ” he said.
Deputy Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah said: “A 17-year-old corpse was tested positive for Ebola virus”.
According to the head of Liberia’s Ebola Incident Management System, a 17-year-old who recently died in Margibi County in the country’s north-central region may have succumbed to the deadly virus.
Health minister Bernice Dahn told a news conference the boy got ill while travelling on the Roberts global Airport Highway and died at a village near the hub, about an hour’s drive southeast of Monrovia.
About 43% of those deaths were in Liberia, where the outbreak peaked between last August and October with hundreds of cases a week. He said the victim has been safely buried and the team tracing the victim’s contacts has already begun work.
Nyenswah told Reuters that, “There is no need to panic”.
Liberia was the country hardest-hit when Ebola started spreading in West Africa at the end of 2013, accounting for more than 4,800 of the 11,220 fatalities recorded by the World Health Organization. Because Nedowein is quite distant to the borders of Guinea and Sierra Leone, investigators are looking at the possibility of travel to be the cause.
In an interview with DW, David Hayman of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said the case shows that “Liberia is still on the alert and able to pick up cases of Ebola and that is a very good sign”.
Cases continue to arise from unknown sources of infection, and to be detected only post-mortem.
Liberian health officials have met with the WHO and the USA Centres for Disease Control over the new case. More people are expected to be identified as potentially at risk.
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Fatoumata Lejeune-Kaba, spokeswoman for the United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency Response, known as UNMEER, said in an exchange with the AP on Twitter, that there is enough resolve from Liberians and capacity in place to contain any spread of Ebola. Altogether, 375 health workers were infected and 189 lost their lives.
