Ebola virus news: Outbreak not yet over? 1 woman confirmed dead due to disease

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Aug 31, 2015 06:00 AM EDT

Just less than a week after Sierra Leone celebrated the release of their last Ebola patient, a new death record confirms that Ebola has not been completely eradicated from the country.

The body of a 67-year-old woman from Kambia district tested positive for Ebola virus, according to health officials.

According to the report by Yahoo, officials are conducting more tests in Sierra Leone's Makeni, the Northern Province town and Freetown after the samples gotten in Kambia resulted positive for Ebola.

"We are particularly concerned because Kambia has gone 50 days without a confirmed Ebola case, suggesting the possibility of an error," Brima Kargbo, the country medical chief officer, told the outlet. Kargbo added that the woman worked as a trader but people who knew her knew that the woman have not traveled in a while.

Huffington Post reports that officials are unsure whether the woman died in Kambia before or after the countdown to the country being Ebola-free began.

In lieu with the new Ebola report, the National Ebola Response Center has sent teams to track and determine the people who had contact with the woman.

"We should not despair as we have been expecting this," OB Sisay, the director of the center told the outlet. "We need to stay focused and maintain our discipline."

It was last Monday that the West African Nation declared the start of the countdown toward being declared free of Ebola, The New York Times reports. The outlet added that the country must be incident-free and disease-free for two incubation periods or 42 days for the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare it Ebola-free.

Survivors of the disease have been found to be suffering from eye problems and joint pain, according to WHO, reported by the International Business Times.

Anders Nordstrom, a Sierra Leone representative for WHO expressed that the massive amount of survivors from the Ebola outbreak has not yet been studied as it is still considered new. He adds that there are more than 13,000 survivors from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone and this feat is "new from a medical and societal point of view."

The report added that those who survived the disease are prone to getting joint pain that hinder them from working properly as well as vision impairment that may be caused by the virus that was present in their eyes. In addition, survivors have been reported to also experience depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and social isolation.

According to a publication by UNICEF, Sierra Leone has had 8,697 confirmed cases of Ebola and 3,586 confirmed deaths as of Aug. 26 of this year.

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