The number of new confirmed Ebola cases totalled 99 in the week to January 25, the lowest tally since June 2014, the World Health Organisation said yesterday, signalling the tide might have turned against the epidemic.
“The response to the EVD [Ebola virus disease] epidemic has now moved to a second phase, as the focus shifts from slowing transmission to ending the epidemic,” the WHO said.
“To achieve this goal as quickly as possible, efforts have moved from rapidly building infrastructure to ensuring that capacity for case finding, case management, safe burials, and community engagement is used as effectively as possible.”
The outbreak has killed 8,810 people out of 22,092 known cases, almost all of them in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
Cases and deaths have fallen rapidly in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the past few weeks, with just 20 deaths recorded in Liberia in the 21 days to January 25. But Guinea reported 30 confirmed cases in the latest week, up from 20 in the previous week. The epidemic is also still spreading geographically there, with a first confirmed case in Guinea’s Mali prefecture bordering Senegal, which reopened its border with Guinea on Monday.
A resurgence of the virus in Guinea, where the outbreak began, would threaten President Alpha Conde’s goal of eradicating Ebola from the country by early March.
“It is too early to declare a success or a deadline for success,” Peter Salama, global Ebola emergency coordinator for the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef), told a news briefing.
“Our work is far from over. During the course of this outbreak, we have repeatedly under-estimated this pathogen. We now have a time-limited window of opportunity to eliminate the virus, by April or May the rains will set in in West Africa, limiting our access and our ability to find cases and trace their contacts,” he said.
Some 10,000 children have lost one or both parents to the Ebola virus, while five million children have been deprived of education, Salama said. “Guinea reopened the schools last week, Liberia will do so next week and Sierra Leone won’t be far behind. It is a really important sign of some semblance of a return to normalcy for these societies,” he said.
Disease experts say that tracking down everyone who has had close contact with an Ebola patient is crucial to ending the outbreak. But in dozens of remote villages in Guinea, angry residents are blocking access for health workers.
The most intense transmission in Guinea is in Forecariah district, amid reports of “high levels of community resistance to response measures” in the area that is close to the border with western Sierra Leone – the worst Ebola hotspot.
African tourism edges back
From the jungle-clad slopes of the Great Lakes to the game parks of South Africa, tourism is beginning to recover as the Ebola outbreak in a corner of the continent ebbs and foreigners overcome their fear of the virus.
The epidemic has been confined overwhelmingly to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, where at least 8,700 people have died. But it has resonated all across the continent in the form of cancelled flights, missed meetings and empty hotel rooms, even though Africa’s main tourist centres are further from the Ebola zone than Paris.
Inquiries at Safaribookings .com, a marketplace for more than 1,200 safari companies in east and southern Africa, were down 25 per cent during the last four months of 2014, but bounced back in January, with a 20 per cent rise compared to a year ago.
“It’s really increased incredibly over the last three weeks,” said Jan Beekwilder, the company’s co-owner. “The surplus is really due to the ending of the crisis.”
Several individual lodge operators, in despair when Reuters contacted them in October, also said business improved since experts started talking about the beginning of the end of the epidemic.
A scaling back of the wall-to-wall media coverage of the handful of Ebola cases that occurred in Europe and the United States – where most tourists to Africa come from – has helped.
'Things are better,' Hotels Association of Tanzania head Lathifa Sykes said, while echoing the frustrations of many Africans who say Westerners often forget that Africa is three times the size of the United States and made up of 54 countries.
Beyond the three countries at the epicentre, Ebola reached only three others, all in West Africa. Eight people died in Nigeria, six in Mali and none in Senegal.