Mali had eight registered cases of Ebola, seven of which were confirmed and one suspected after infection spread when a symptomatic imam from Kourémalé, Guinea, arrived in Bamako, Mali's capital, in late October for treatment.
The country of about 14.5 million, however, now has zero confirmed cases after the last patient who contracted the highly deadly virus was successfully treated, President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita said on Saturday,
At a summit in Senegal, Keita said that there are no longer cases of Ebola infection in Mali, Africa's eighth-largest country, after a suspected patient was found negative of the virus and the last known Ebola patient in the country was cured.
"At this moment, there are no cases of infection," Keita said. "The suspected case turned out to be negative and the day before yesterday we had the good news of the first cured case of Ebola, so I can now say zero cases in Mali."
The World Health Organization said that of the eight registered cases, six of those patients have died. The country had also been tracing contacts of the cases to prevent further spread of the virus. There are currently 285 people being monitored for possibly having been exposed to the virus.
"In the past few weeks, Mali has responded quickly to find people who came into contact with someone infected with the disease," WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said. "This rapid response was essential to prevent the disease from spreading."
While Mali is now Ebola-free, other affected countries in West Africa remain in a grim situation. WHO said on Friday that the number of people across the region who have contracted the hemorrhagic fever has now reached over 16,000, with the death toll already reaching nearly 7,000. Most of the fatalities were recorded in Liberia.
Infection is spreading fastest in Sierra Leone. While the infection rate is stabilizing or declining in Liberia and Guinea, Ebola cases soared in Sierra Leone, where about 400 to 500 new cases emerged per week for several weeks. The country already suffers from shortages of treatment beds, health-care workers and members of burial teams.
"As long as there's one person with Ebola out there, then the crisis isn't over and Ebola is a risk to the people of that community, that country, this sub-region, this continent, this world," U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response head Anthony Banbury told the Associated Press. "Our goal and what we will achieve is getting it down to zero, but there's no doubt it's going to be a long, hard fight."
