The nation was then declared Ebola-free for a second time on September 3rd.
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This is the fourth wave of the Ebola Virus in the country, months after the country was declared free of the disease.
Liberia has registered more than 10,600 cases and 4,808 deaths since the beginning of the Ebola epidemic.
Another senior health official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record, said the teen was taken on Wednesday to the principal Ebola treatment unit. “The key is to stop it, find the source, and prevent the next one”.
“The child has no known history of contact with a survivor or having been at a funeral [where an Ebola victim was buried]”, said Aylward, referring to the fact that secretions from the corpses of those who died from the virus are highly contagious.
The patients and other high risk contacts including the family members are in care at an Ebola Treatment Unit in Monrovia, Dahan said.
Aylward says that with so many Ebola survivors right now in West Africa, “You’ve got to treat it [additional cases] as an inevitability in terms of your preparedness”.
In October, Pauline Cafferkey – a British nurse who contracted Ebola while doing aid work in Sierra Leone and was thought to have recovered in January – fell ill again due to complications from the virus.
But the senior health official said the boy had gone to school on Monday and Tuesday of this week, and an official involved with the investigation said the boy’s father had told health workers that the boy came home sick from school on November 13, was treated at home by his parents over the weekend, and went back to school on Monday.
“The new instances in Liberia demonstrate both the continuing danger of sporadic instances, as well as the preparedness of the country, which quickly diagnosed and isolated them”, Dr. Frieden said in an email.
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But in Sierra Leone, as well as Liberia and Guinea – the three countries most affected by the Ebola epidemic – rural communities did not resist those efforts because they “saw the disease as a kind of curse that tore families apart”, as the article stated.
