A 3-week-old girl in Guinea believed to be the last victim of Ebola has recovered, potentially signaling the end of an unprecedented two-year epidemic in West Africa that claimed more than 11,300 lives.
"It suddenly looks like we really could be at an end before Christmas," said Margaret Harris, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization (WHO).
By global health standards, 42 days must pass without another case of Ebola for Guinea to be declared free of the disease. The incubation period for Ebola is 21 days and out of an abundance of caution, twice that period of time must pass before the WHO declares the disease is defeated in Guinea.
Two neighboring countries also ravaged by the Ebola epidemic, Liberia and Sierra Leone, have already been declared Ebola free.
Guinea was the last country plagued by the deadly virus, which at its peak last year infected 400 to 500 people a week in West Africa. Health workers say the poverty stricken nation remains particularly vulnerable to new cases because many of the latest victims were people not known to have been exposed to the virus.
"In Guinea, it's been a lot more difficult," Harris said. "A year and a half later, we're still getting people diagnosed after death. It means that the messages (about vigilance) are still not percolating through and all the importance of those actions are not being realized."
The potential final victim is a girl named Nubia who was born Oct. 27 in a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Conakry. She is the first infant born with the deadly virus to have survived.
Nubia's mother died of Ebola hours after giving birth and the infant was found to be infected with the virus. But Nubia responded well to treatment at the facility where she was born and on Monday tested negative for Ebola, said Laurence Sailly, an emergency coordinator in Guinea for Doctors Without Borders.
Throughout her three weeks of life, Nubia has never felt a human touch because all medical care has been done by doctors and nurses wearing protective clothing. That may finally end next week, Sailly said.
"We've never had such a young survivor. So there are still a lot of things we are learning in taking care of her," Sailly said. "She's doing fine. She's eating well. She's gaining weight every day."
Sailly said the 42-day countdown toward declaring Guinea Ebola-free began Tuesday. "The government and communities have worked hard with us to arrive at this result. We must still remain vigilant for any potential new cases so that our achievements will not be destroyed," Sailly said.
The epidemic in West Africa triggered a global humanitarian response — and set off far-ranging fears, including in the United States, when a few cases surfaced of infected people who had returned to their home countries from Africa. Last year, President Obama dispatched 3,000 U.S. troops to assist in building clinics and training health care workers in Liberia.
Liberia was declared Ebola-free earlier this year. Sierra Leone followed suit earlier this month.
Harris said the challenge of defeating Ebola in Guinea was overcoming stigma and suspicions of outsiders in remote villages where the disease would surface. Guinea is geographically a far larger country than either Liberia or Sierra Leone and this allowed the virus to spread long distances to communities where health workers had to overcome local resistance toward them to defeat the disease.
Harris said a key factor in defeating the virus in recent months was a new vaccine known as rVSV developed by Iowa-based NewLink Genetics that has been administered to anyone exposed to Ebola in Guinea, as well as to an outer circle of people exposed to those who had been near the virus.
"The case numbers have really begun to come down," Harris said.
Only pregnant women and young children are not eligible for the vaccine because of safety reasons. Harris said that of the last six cases of Ebola in Guinea, two were pregnant women and the other four were children. In recent days, with the exception Nubia, all of those other patients had either died or recovered. Now that Nubia is testing negative for the virus, no other known cases exist, Harris said.
Still, there have been previous countdowns toward Ebola-free status in West Africa that have failed when new cases surfaced.
"We are in need of very strong surveillance for the next 42 days and even longer than that," Sailly said. "We are very happy. But we are very cautious."
Source:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/11/17/last-known-ebola-patient-baby-girl-recovers/75916410/
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