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JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): .....the battle to contain Ebola in West Africa.
The World Health Organization reported today that Liberia and Guinea have met two key targets. They’re now isolating 70 percent of those infected, and ensuring safe burials for 70 percent of those who have died. More than 6,900 people have been killed by the virus during this outbreak.
Laurie Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations is back from a recent trip to Liberia and Sierra Leone. She has a new e-book called “Ebola: Story of an Outbreak.” She is symptom-free, but since she is still being monitored, we spoke with her by Skype from New York.
Laurie Garrett, welcome.
So there is some good news today from the WHO about Guinea and Liberia. How do you size up the situation there, having just come back?
LAURIE GARRETT, Council on Foreign Relations: Well, certainly, in Liberia, the American presence has made a difference. The staggering capacity of the Liberians themselves, the way they have organized, has made a difference.
And, indeed, that epidemic, which was doom and gloom in September, has plummeted. Now, the danger is to get cocky and think, OK, so, it’s all over, we can all go back to behaving exactly as we did before Ebola emerged.
And, of course, Liberia made that mistake before, back in April, thinking that it had this small intrusion from Guinea, but it was over and everybody could go back to business as usual. And, of course, we know what happened after that.
Guinea, I have not been in Guinea, but I can say that the data we have so far looks promising. That’s a country where the president himself has deeply engaged in fighting the epidemic. Sierra Leone is another story.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, what about the challenges in Sierra Leone, based on what you saw?
LAURIE GARRETT: It’s a really tough situation.
Physically, it’s a very tough country, mountainous, hilly, lots of mud, very difficult just to simply get around from place to place. And in Freetown, in the capital, you have a really massive level of denial.
The kind of social distancing, where everybody in Liberia stays a certain distance away from the next person and washes their hands in bleach, you don’t really see that in Freetown. You don’t really see that in Sierra Leone. You don’t have a sense that people are really appropriately fearful.
And then, on top of everything else, they have very complicated burial and funeral rituals that are quite dangerous. And people are not reporting loved ones that are sick or dead, because they don’t want to be forbidden to practice traditional funereal services.
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