The country head of the United Nations World Health Organization said the fight against the Ebola epidemic has entered its 3rd phase and called for increased vigor to end the epidemic.
Dr Anders Nordstrom, in a statement issued Monday, said this stage of the fight involved tracking each and every chain of the virus transmission and closing down the remaining chains as quickly as possible.
The WHO said Sierra Leone was now down to a single chain of transmission, which started in Freetown but sparked a cluster of cases in Tonkolili, in the northern region of the country.
“An epidemiological week has now passed with no new Ebola cases for the first time since the beginning of the outbreak,” the WHO statement says.
“This is very good news but we have to keep doing this intensively-working with communities to identify potentially new cases early and rapidly stop any Ebola virus transmission” said Dr Nordstrom.
Sierra Leone currently has only two known Ebola patients countrywide. According to reports, one of those is set to be discharged sometime this week.
For the last one week, the country has recorded no new case, raising hope that it is on its way to beginning the countdown for 42-day windowed required for WHO to declare the country free of the epidemic.
But to get to this, says the UN health agency, will require continuation of the use of rapid response teams and strong community involvement in finding EVD cases and contacts.
It said effectively tracking chains of transmission meant finding every person who had been in contact with someone proven to be infected with Ebola, monitoring them closely for symptoms for 21 days and rapidly moving them to a treatment centre if they developed symptom of Ebola.
The recent chain of transmission in Tonkolili was sparked by a young man, who worked in Freetown but returned to his home village every month to bring food and money to his extended family, died in a hospital where he was being treated for malaria. A swab test later came back positive but it was too late for those who were close to the victim. Over 500 people were subsequently quarantined.
Before this case Tonkolili had not seen a case of Ebola virus disease for more than 150 days.
The entire village of Massessehbeh, where the man was, was put in quarantine for a period of 21 days, as was Masenga Hospital where he died.
Only two cases, both of them members of the young man`s family, came back positive out of that quarantine. They are both recovering and one of them is due for discharge.
They were treated at an Ebola Treatment Centre which had been on standby and run by International Medical Corps (IMC).
As of Monday, 43 people remained in quarantine and are expected to be released by the end of this week. Another 38 people remain in quarantine in Freetown until the 29th of August.
(C) Politico 19/08/15
