A major issue at the President Council meeting today on Ebola
was how to communicate the second phase,
now when the numbers are down to about 10 cases per day in the country.
The discussion was how to handle zero.
In many public health campaigns, we say "zero traffic deaths",
but we really don't mean zero traffic deaths.
We mean that we want to get them as low as possible.
If we use that in Ebola,
it has to be used in a way so people really realize
that we have to eliminate human to human transmission completely.
The first message in Liberia was, "Ebola is real".
Today, the population of this country
is sadly aware that Ebola is real.
The new message now will be, "Ebola must go".
I think that's a good message
because it doesn't put a time limit.
Because we need endurance: this may take months, half a year.
Liberia is not in control of the future
because the neighboring countries also have Ebola
and they have much more than Liberia.
So the whole region has to be freed from it.
The longer I work here -I'm here for the seventh week now-
the more I realize how huge this task is.
This has never been done before.
An African big city with generalized Ebola epidemics
that hasn't existed before,
no one has done what we have to do the next few months here.
We have to clear Monrovia and the Montserrado County completely
from Ebola transmission.
It's a huge task, but it can be done, it's possible.
We just need to get organized
with all the resources that are now available.