May 2015

By Andrea Blanch, Ph.D. and David Shern, Ph.D.

Two weeks ago, Liberia was officially declared “Ebola free.”  Liberia was ground zero of the Ebola epidemic, with confirmed cases in all 15 counties and almost 5,000 Ebola-related deaths.  Chronic poverty and years of civil war had devastated the country’s health care system. At the height of the epidemic, containing the disease seemed almost impossible.  But the last reported case was in March.