A 15-year-old boy has died of Ebola in Liberia, which was previously declared free of the virus.
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Close to 160 people who’d been in contact with the family are under watch, including 10 healthcare workers considered at high risk of infection because they treated the patients before it was known they had Ebola.
He added that the mother of the 10-year-old and two of his siblings are also being monitored daily. The experts are expected to help the Government of Liberia deal with the deadly virus which entered the country through a single case in Foya, Lofa County in early 2014 before later becoming an global crisis.
The panel of experts, from the Harvard Global Health Institute and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, proposed ten changes, from expanding the possibilities of an epidemic response beyond the WHO, to creating economic incentives for countries to report the outbreaks, instead of hiding them.
Fischer, a professor at the University of North Carolina who’s been studying Ebola survivors, was speaking about the new cases in Liberia.
How the latest Ebola case was transmitted to Nathan Groote, the 15-year-old from the Monrovia neighborhood of Paynesville, remains a mystery.
“We don’t have a lot of information because investigation is ongoing”, Bruce Aylward, the World Health Organization’s special representative for the Ebola response, said.
The panel’s recommendations include encouraging countries to report outbreaks sooner, incentivizing companies to develop diagnostic tests and treatments for neglected diseases like Ebola, and creating a centralized group within the World Health Organization that handles global outbreaks, among several others. The death was also the first Ebola fatality since July. “It is quite possible that people were exhausted and got complacent”. The latest confirmed cases come ahead of a scheduled trade and investment conference on November 30th in The Hague, Netherlands for the three most affected Ebola countries – Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
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“I think it is a surprise for us all but it also just demonstrates how much we don’t know about the virus”, says Carissa Guild, a nurse who is in charge of Doctors Without Borders operations in Liberia. Guinea, the third West African nation where the recent outbreak was centered, has not reported a new case since the end of last month and has begun a 42-day countdown to be declared Ebola free.
