The largest Ebola outbreak in history prompted Liberia to close its borders on Monday, as the government worked to educate its citizens about the disease.
Five months after Ebola took root in Guinea, quickly spreading to its West African neighbors, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf shut down Liberia’s borders, banned large gatherings such as funerals, and dispatched health workers to check travelers at the airport, said Assistant Minister of Health Tolbert Nyenswah.
Soon, she may start quarantining neighborhoods in Liberian cities, he said.
Still, those moves will be difficult to enforce in a country where even many government workers haven’t accepted the existence or epidemiology of the virus as scientific fact.
Ebola, one of the deadliest diseases known, has killed roughly two-thirds of those it has infected in this outbreak. Of 1,023 cases, 660 have died. In some outbreaks, 90% of those infected have died.
While it isn’t airborne like the flu, it can still spread easily with firm traditions or beliefs involving the care or burial rites of loved ones. The disease spreads through contact with blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of an infected person—or their deceased bodies, according to the World Health Organization. People can also become infected through contact with environments contaminated with those fluids, according to the WHO.
The ban on funerals may meet resistance from Liberians who refuse to let doctors in protective suits deal with the bodies of their loved ones. Quarantining sections of the capital, Monrovia, a densely packed city of 1.2 million people, may prove difficult as neighborhoods blend together, demarcated from one another by hard-to-police back alleys cutting between shacks.