Liberia confirms 2 new Ebola cases

MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) — Two new cases of Ebola have emerged from the same Liberian community where the virus resurged the other week, the acting head of the country’s Ebola Case Management Team said Thursday.

Dr. Francis Kateh said the number of confirmed Ebola cases has risen to five, including the 17-year-old teen who died of the disease on June 28. The latest patients, a boy and a girl, were brought to a treatment center Wednesday from the same Nedowein community where the teen died.

All four confirmed patients are at a treatment center near Monrovia, Dr. Kateh said.

He said 120 people have been quarantined, and that 14 who are considered active “high risk” contacts are being monitored.

The last recorded case in Liberia before this latest emergence was March 20, according to the World Health Organization, which had declared the country free from transmission on May 9.

Tests are being done to help determine the mode of transmission to the teenager. He first became ill June 21 and went to a local health facility where he was treated for malaria and discharged, WHO has said.

Experts had warned that Ebola remained a threat to West Africa until it is eradicated from Guinea and Sierra Leone where it stubbornly hangs on.

In Sierra Leone, the government said Wednesday a curfew would extend in Ebola-affected areas. Sierra Leone recently recorded 10 new confirmed Ebola cases, focused in the east of Freetown.

“Sierra Leone continues to try and eradicate Ebola from its last remaining districts and has implemented two deliberate operations in which to achieve this,” the CEO of the National Ebola Response Center, Maj. Alfred Palo Conteh, said earlier this week.

The Ebola outbreak has killed more than 11,200 people, mostly in West Africa.

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Associated Press writer Clarence Roy-Macaulay in Freetown, Sierra Leone contributed to this report.

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