Mayor Mike Elliott talks to Marco Werman about how his childhood in Liberia prepared him for this leadership moment — as his city grapples with the killing of Daunte Wright, and braces for the verdict in the case of George Floyd's death.
It's hard to learn to read when your country has been torn apart by war and disease. It's even harder when children's books come from far away. But Wayétu Moore, whose family fled Liberia's civil war when she was five, is setting out to change the odds for kids in Liberia and other countries with low literacy.
Liberia is Ebola-free, says the World Health Organization. But experts say that the problem of Ebola is far from over.
Disposing of millions of tons of potentially Ebola infected human sewage is no easy task. But Liberia has is attempting its own solution.
In Liberia, the first thing pupils do is have their temperatures taken. Schools had been shut for seven months after the Ebola outbreak.
There are plenty of kinds of workers mobilizing to fight Ebola in West Africa, not just doctors and nurses. They include "contact tracers," who monitor people and try to get them to respect quarantines. They say they're still doing a vital job without the tools they need.
Public concern about the spread of Ebola in Liberia seems to be waning, even though about 10 new cases continue to be reported in the capital Monrovia every day. Now the possibility of Senate elections there next week has health officials especially worried.
For those fighting Ebola on the front lines, personal protective equipment — those infamous hazmat suits — are both necessary and cumbersome. According to epidemiologist Sharon McDonnell, healthcare workers struggle to work around the limitations of that equipment — while taking a host of other precautions.
While it may seem as though media attention surrounding the Ebola outbreak has dwindled, President Barack Obama has said that "we are nowhere near out of the woods yet in West Africa" — meaning volunteers are still needed. Physician and epidemiologist Sharon McDonnell is one of those volunteers, and she says her experience working during the AIDS crisis offers her some perspective.
The issue of quarantine is not only a hot-button topic in the US: Officials in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, for instance, have grappled with the issue for months. And that is why some are now looking to Liberia to draw upon lessons learned from an evolved quarantine policy.
It's been 21 days since registered nurse Deborah Wilson worked with Ebola patients in Liberia. That means she's Ebola-free. She's proud of the work she did with Ebola patients, but it's made life difficult — not because of illness, but because of stigmatization from even her closest friends.