Bukola Adebayo
The World Health Organisation Director General, Dr. Margaret Chan, has said any remaining travel or trade restrictions put in place at the height of the epidemic to help limit the spread of the deadly virus should be lifted.
According to her, they are no more necessary as the disease outbreak in West Africa is no longer a global health emergency.
The announcement came after an emergency committee meeting to review the situation in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea was held in Geneva on Tuesday.
The WHO, however, urged the international health community to keep up the fight against future outbreaks of the disease and to continue work on a vaccine.
It stated,,”The committee noted that since its last meeting, all three countries have met the criteria for confirming interruption of their original chains of Ebola virus transmission,”
“Specifically, all three countries have now completed the 42-day observation period and additional 90-day enhanced surveillance period since their last case that was linked to the original chain of transmission twice tested negative.”
As expected, there have been “flare-ups” and a handful of new cases, most recently in Guinea, that relate to a new single chain of transmission. That case has infected eight people and seven of them have died.
The committee reviewed the data from those cases and determined that there is enough expertise on the ground to contain the spread, meaning the risk of the current cases leading to the spread of the disease is low. A genetic trace of the Ebola virus can live on in someone’s semen for a little over a year after the person has experienced initial symptoms of the disease, but it is at a low level.
The committee said it believes there will soon be even fewer of these clusters.
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