“The corpse has been buried and our contact tracing has started work”, Deputy Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah said on Tuesday, the Huffington Post noted.
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Second, health officials didn’t know the teenager had Ebola until after he died.So he could have unwittingly spread the disease to his family and caretakers.
“After presenting at a local health facility the patient was treated for malaria and discharged”, WHO said in its weekly update on Ebola.
Health minister Bernice Dahn asked citizens to prepare themselves for further cases, although no new infections had emerged as of Wednesday morning.
In May, Liberia was deemed Ebola free from public health organizations after no new cases surfaced in more than 40 days.
There were no immediate details either on the two new cases, as epidemiologists scrambled Wednesday to trace and quarantine anyone else who may have had contact with the teenager. “I am confused”, said Jeneba Freeman, 45, a stallholder in the capital’s Redlight market.
The Ebola epidemic virus has killed at least 3,700 people in Liberia alone, the most of any country, and almost 9,000 across in West Africa. “There is no known source of infection and there’s no information about him traveling to Guinea or [Sierra Leone]”, a spokesperson for the ministry of health told Science.
Ebola is spread among humans via the bodily fluids of recently deceased victims and people showing symptoms of the tropical fever, which include vomiting, diarrhoea and – in the worst cases – massive internal haemorrhaging and external bleeding.
In the streets of Monrovia, people expressed fear of another flare-up in cases as shopkeepers began placing buckets of chlorine in entrance ways.
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Experts are speculating that the latest victim could have been infected by an entirely new variation of the virus from an animal such as a fruit bat rather than by a human. “Now everybody has one again, just like the way it was in 2014”. More than a million people get malaria every year in Liberia. At the end of June, Liberia reported 41 cases, compared with 390 in Guinea and 158 in Sierra Leone.
