Just two months after Liberia was declared free of the deadly virus, 153 people have contracted the disease and are under constant medical surveillance in a concerted effort to keep the virus from spreading again.
The number currently stands at 153 people being under constant medical surveillance in Liberia as new outbreaks of the deadly Ebola virus have once again surfaced in the capital city of Monrovia. The Liberian medical community wants to keep a close watch on this new outbreak that has come just two months after the World Health Organization (WHO) said the country was free of the virus.
WHO is baffled about the new outbreaks in Monrovia because the recent outbreak has not formed along previous patterns for the disease, reports USA Today. Three new cases of Ebola came to light in Monrovia on Friday. One of the cases was a 15-year-old boy. Two of the teen’s family members were also tested and found positive for having the virus. This made 153 active cases of Ebola in the country. Liberia was the hardest hit by the two-year epidemic, suffering 4,800 deaths from the disease in that short period.
Liberia’s two closes neighbors, Sierra Leone and Guinea, have been declared free of the disease by WHO and they have no known cases at this time. In order for a country to be officially declared free of the disease, 42 consecutive days must past without an outbreak or even a single case recorded.
Twice so far Liberia was declared free of the Ebola virus but it has returned. What medical personnel are declaring is that they are investigating the contraction of the virus through the mixing of bodily fluids from an infected patient to one who had been disease free. The Ebola virus had been detected in the semen of an American doctor recently. He contracted the disease while working to battle the epidemic outbreak in Sierra Leone. Though he has been successfully treated, some of the virus still remains in one of his eyes.
Medical experts are not ruling out that people have become infected with Ebola through contact with an infected animal. It was believed that the original epidemic outbreak in 2013 was cause by a 10-year-old boy who had been bitten by a bat. More than 11,300 people died in the two-year Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
