Liberia cautiously marks end of Ebola after 42 days with no new cases

On the day Mercy Kennedy lost her mother to Ebola, it was hard to imagine a time when Liberia would be free from one of the world's deadliest viruses. It had swept through the nine-year-old's neighbourhood, killing people house by house.

Neighbours were so fearful that Mercy, too, might be sick that no one would touch her to comfort her as tears streamed down her face. She had only a tree to lean on as she wept.

Now seven months later, Liberia on Saturday officially marked the end of the epidemic that claimed more than 4,700 lives here, and Mercy is thriving in the care of a family friend not far from where she used to live.

"What we went through here was terrifying," said Martu Weefor, 39, who is now raising Mercy alongside her three biological children and Mercy's older brother. "Nobody wanted to pass on our road or have anything to do with us. Everybody was afraid of the community. I thank God that Liberia is free from Ebola."

Saturday marked 42 days since Liberia's last Ebola case - the benchmark used to declare the outbreak over because it represents two incubation periods of 21 days for new cases to emerge. The World Health Organisation called the milestone a "monumental achievement for a country that reported the highest number of deaths in the largest, longest, and most complex outbreak since Ebola first emerged in 1976".

The statistics of loss, though, are enormous in Liberia: 189 health workers dead. Some 3,290 children lost one or both parents to the disease, though most have been placed with other relatives or in foster care.