Sierra Leone's long-running Ebola epidemic, which has claimed 4,000 lives and infected more than 13,000, has finally ground to a halt, with no new cases being reported in the country for a week. The country took the hardest hit in the epidemic, making the week-long period of no new Ebola cases a very welcome milestone in the battle against the disease.
The last Ebola case that was reported happened two weeks ago, when an 8-month-old baby was hospitalized after showing symptoms of the disease. The infant passed away four days later, according to The Guardian.
Those who came in contact with the infected child were moved to a quarantine facility. However, none of the people have shown any signs of the disease.
Marshall Elliott, director of the UK government's interagency taskforce, said that hopes are currently high that the infected infant was the last of the Ebola victims in the country.
"We will wait to see if any of those high-risk people develop [Ebola] but if not, and even if they do, we have them safely out of the community. Our hope is that that is the last bit of this outbreak," he said.
Dr. However, Craig Spencer, a physician from New York, who ended up catching the disease while volunteering in Guinea last October, said that the fight against the disease must continue despite the absence of cases, reports NPR.
"The West African epidemic is incredibly stubborn and has proved hard to control," he stated. "We've had spells when the number of new cases in both Guinea and Sierra Leone went down steadily - only to be reversed by clusters in new areas."
Efforts have been made internationally to address the Ebola epidemic. So far, remediation strategies have been quite successful, with Ebola outbreaks being controlled and stopped, as reported in this HNGN article.
Ebola Outbreak: Sierra Leone Finally Ebola-Free
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