Liberia had a peak of more than 300 new cases a week in August and September.
Meanwhile in Guinea, there were only 20 confirmed cases last week against 45 the week before while the figure for Sierra Leone was 117 last week against 184 the week before.
Guinean’s President Alpha Conde, however, said his country was “still at war” against Ebola despite declining cases in his small nation.
The worst outbreak of the virus in history has seen the three west African nations register almost 9000 deaths in a year, although experts believe the real toll could be far higher.
The WHO said in its latest update on the epidemic that 8688 people had died, among a cumulative total of 21,759 cases, since the epidemic broke out in Guinea a year ago.
The agency has recognised significant progress in beating back Ebola but warned yesterday that the crisis was still “extremely alarming”.
“We have five confirmed Ebola cases in Liberia as of today,” Liberian assistant health minister Tolbert Nyensuwah told AFP.
He said three of the cases were in the capital Monrovia, while the others were in the north-western counties of Bomi and Grand Cape Mount.
“It means that we are going down to zero if everything goes well, if other people don’t get sick in other places.”
The announcement has not been verified by World Health Organisation officials, whose statistics often differ from the tallies of individual countries.
At the height of the epidemic in August and September, Liberia was reporting more than 300 new cases a week and overwhelmed aid workers were having to turn people away from swamped clinics, often to die in 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, and the country reported just eight new cases last week.
Liberia counts patients who have tested positive for Ebola and those who have died but whose contacts are still being monitored for possible infection as live confirmed cases.
The Sierra Leone government in Freetown lifted quarantine measures imposed at the height of the epidemic yesterday.
The nation of six million had restricted travel for around half its population, sealing off six of its 14 districts and numerous tribal chiefdoms.
Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma pointed to a “steady downward trend” in new cases in recent weeks, adding that “victory is in sight”.
WHO warned that progress made so far could rapidly be undone unless $US250 million ($316 million) was made available to continue the fight over the coming months.
“We are still in a very, very dangerous situation with this virus,” WHO number two Bruce Aylward told reporters in Geneva.
“Especially now … that we are heading into the rainy season very, very soon. That’s going to hit us in April, May, and that will make the response that much more complicated.”
The relaxation — and the progress seen in Liberia — nevertheless marks huge progress against an epidemic which has seen commerce all but grind to a halt, with restrictions on movement halting crop harvests and sparking warnings of a looming food crisis.
British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline said yesterday its candidate Ebola vaccine was expected to arrive in Liberia later in the day.
The batch of 300 vials will be the first to arrive in one of the main Ebola-hit countries and will be used in trials led by the US National Institutes of Health in the coming weeks involving up to 30,000 people.
About 200 volunteers are already testing the candidate vaccine in smaller-scale trials Britain, the USs, Switzerland and Mali, with initial results showing it to be safe.
In Switzerland, Guinea’s President Conde, speaking to AFP on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, said the decline was no reason for complacency.
“It’s precisely because things are getting better that we have to stay vigilant in order to get to zero cases,” Mr Conde said.
“Our priority is to end Ebola, because everything stems from there,” Mr Conde said. First on his mind was the Guinean economy, which has been ravaged by the effects of the Ebola epidemic.
“We have to see how to compensate for the damage that Ebola has inflicted on our economy and our finances,” Mr Conde said, adding that the International Monetary Fund should forgive the poor country’s debt.
That call is backed by the US, IMF’s largest shareholder, which has urged the crisis lender to wipe out around a fifth of the debt owed it by the three Ebola-hit African nations.
“The consequences are extremely serious for our economy, business executives no longer come to our country,” the leader said.
“To close mining deals, talks had to take place by video conference and schools only opened last Monday,” he said.
Conde spoke to AFP at the Swiss ski resort just as the often tense political situation in Guinea was once again heating up.
Mr Conde, a former rebel, defeated opposition leader Cellou Dalein Diallo to take the presidency in the country’s first-ever democratic poll in 2010.
But this stoked deadly ethnic tensions that have dogged Guinean politics since independence.
On Thursday, thousands of opposition activists rallied in the Guinean capital demanding “anyone but Alpha” Conde be returned in presidential polls expected before the end of the year.
Mr Conde declined to answer questions on the impending election or on whether he would again seek office.
“For the time being, I have a war to lead, the war against Ebola,” he said.
AFP
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