I am professor Hans Rosling
I'm am participating in the fight against Ebola
here in Liberia.
In this country the number of new cases per day has come down
from almost 100 in the end of september
to now in the beginning in December
around 10 per day.
But that is still very dangerous!
Because the only safe and stable level for Ebola is zero cases per day.
So we say Ebola must go all the way down to zero.
We must stop transmission among humans.
But that is difficult now at the low level
because Ebola is hiding in between the other infectious diseases
So we have to be like detectives and hunt the virus
and we do that using a method called "contact tracing".
I will show you how it works.
Imagine that this is a patient that is very sick with Ebola.
It's a contagious disease and everyone that has been in contact with this patient may be infected.
So what we need to do are two things:
we need to take the patients to an Ebola Treatment Center and isolate them,
and then we have to list all the contacts.
We have to make a list with everyone that was in contact
with this patient during the days that he/she was sick.
Then we start what we call the 'contact tracing'.
In the next 21 days
we follow all these persons
and we have to follow them everyday, check the temperature and ask them how they feel
and if one of them is infected,
let's say that this one is infected
and this one is infected
we don't know, there is no test we can use.
So we just have to follow them.
Now those who are not infected, we follow them for 21 days and we find nothing
we follow this one, we find nothing
same here
But this one that has the virus in the body
after 10 or 15 days, they get fever, headache, diarrhea
and then very fast we isolate them.
So when they develop full blown Ebola here
they are very contagious, they are already in the Treatment Center
and they are isolated.
Now this one here...
May not have confidence in our system
they are scared and they decide...
"no, I get a little fever today, hope it's malaria"
and they move away somewhere else
they avoid our contact tracers.
That's very dangerous!
Because then they would get Ebola outside our control
and they may infect other persons.
And we may also have missed one person down here
Let's say this is the brother to the case
and he took a bicycle and went to relatives' to live there.
If he was infected, we won't know it.
He will develop Ebola here and infect others.
So we need a perfect contact tracing system,
and perfect means that everyone has to be listed.
So that when they develop the disease
we can isolate them immediately.
And those who are scared and don't trust that it's the best to wait for the contact tracer
we have to convince them and have to be very kind
so that they would like to be included in our system
and we can isolate them like that.
Now the challenge today in Liberia is that
we have six thousand contacts we are following.
and they live throughout the country
most of them here in Monrovia.
And it's far from a perfect system.
We have a leakage of patients who are not in the system
like this one
and those who we loose during the control.
But they're getting better and better.
And we need more resources
today we don't need more Ebola Treatment Units
we need more international support for
this contact tracing.
And we need people who come and stay for several months
then we can find all these contacts
and we can follow them perfectly
So somewhere in the next year
when we have made this better and better
then we may end Ebola transmission completely.
And then it also has to be done in the neighbouring countries.
That is possible, but it requires lots of resources
and lots of endurance
that we don't give up
because we have only one objective:
Ebola must go! Go all the way down to zero.