Monrovia - The UN health agency on Saturday declared Liberia Ebola-free, hailing the "monumental" achievement in the west African country where the virus has killed more than 4,700 people.
"The outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Liberia is over," the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement, adding that 42 days had passed since the last confirmed case was buried.
The period is twice the number of days the virus requires to incubate, and WHO hailed its eradication as an enormous development in the long crisis.
"Interruption of transmission is a monumental achievement for a country that reported the highest number of deaths in the largest, longest, and most complex outbreak since Ebola first emerged in 1976," it said.
During the two months of peak transmission in August and September "the capital city Monrovia was the setting for some of the most tragic scenes from West Africa's outbreak: gates locked at overflowing treatment centres, patients dying on the hospital grounds, and bodies that were sometimes not collected for days", it added.
At the height of the crisis in late September Liberia was suffering more than 400 new cases a week, with uncollected and highly infectious bodies piling up in the streets of Monrovia, a sprawling, chaotic city at the best of times.
The health system -- embryonic before the crisis, with some 50 doctors and 1,000 nurses for 4.3 million people -- was devastated, losing 189 health workers out of 275 infected.
"At one point, virtually no treatment beds for Ebola patients were available anywhere in the country.
Schools remained shut after the summer holidays, unemployment soared as the formal and black-market economies collapsed and clinics closed as staff died and non-emergency healthcare ground to a halt.
And then, as suddenly as it had spread, Ebola retreated.
Liberia, which had recorded 389 deaths in one week in October alone, found fatality counts dropping below 100 within weeks, and into single figures by the start of 2015.
During a WHO-hosted ceremony Saturday in the Ebola crisis cell in Monrovia, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf saluted her fellow citizens and health workers for rising to the crisis.
"I thank all Liberians for the effort. When Ebola came, we were confused. We called on our professionals. They put their best in the fight, this is the result I have sent a message to the international community to thank them," she said.
Despite Liberia's accomplishment, however, WHO warned that because Ebola outbreaks were continuing in neighbouring Guinea and Sierra Leone, the risk remained high that infected people could re-enter the country.
AFP
