GENEVA: Liberia, once the country worst hit by the Ebola outbreak, hopes to have no new cases by the end of next month, a government minister said on Monday.
The worst outbreak of the virus in history has seen the west African nation and its neighbours Guinea and Sierra Leone register almost 9,000 deaths in a year.
But according to the latest figures, the number of registered cases in Liberia is now just down to five against a peak of more than 300 a week in August and September.
"We think we can make it to zero by the end of February latest," Liberian Commerce Minister Axel Addy told reporters in Geneva. "We're quite optimistic."
He said 12 of the country's 15 counties had reported no new cases, adding: "We've made a tremendous leap."
"The border towns are being monitored very closely... to ensure that cases in the area do not spread beyond the borders," Addy added.
At the height of the epidemic in a country whose health infrastructure was ravaged by two back-to-back civil wars, overflowing health clinics had to turn away people, often to die on the streets.
But a huge international response has seen hundreds of US healthcare workers and troops flood into the country to train nurses and set up Ebola units.
"We now have the logistics right," Addy said.
The main problem now, he said, was getting the battered economy back on track.
"We've seen a revenue loss of $93 million (82 million euros)," Addy said adding that the key mining sector "has come to a grinding halt."
The World Health Organization said in its latest update on the epidemic that 8,688 people had died out of a total of 21,759 cases, since the disease emerged in Guinea a year ago.
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