Liberia's President: Ebola Re-Energized Her Downtrodden Country

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO interview by David Greene                                                    March 2, 2015

There's a lot to celebrate in Liberia: The number of new Ebola cases have been declining, kids are going back to school and life is returning to some semblance of normalcy.

Last year, Ebola struck the country and since then, it has killed more than 4,000 Liberians. But among the three hardest-hit countries in West Africa, Liberia has been the fastest at containing the outbreak. Just last week, the region reported 99 new cases of Ebola. Only one of those came out of Liberia.

 Still, "there's always that fear," Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf tells NPR's David Greene during an interview Monday on Morning Edition. It's the fear that Ebola will erupt again and kill thousands more. "Until the other two affected countries [Guinea and Sierra Leone] have made equal progress," Sirleaf says, "we'll continue to be at risk."

Yet Liberia will keep its borders with the two countries open, even as its neighbors continue to report dozens of new cases a week. Might as well, says Johnson-Sirleaf, because there's no use closing a long and porous border. "People were moving across the borders anyway, for trading [and] meeting with families," she tells NPR. "So we might as well open them, but make sure that we put in place measures that will monitor those movements."

Reas complete story.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2015/03/02/389478897/liberias-president-ebola-re-energized-her-downtrodden-country