In a meeting at the White House with President Obama, Ms. Johnson Sirleaf asked for help with power projects to keep the country’s hospitals and new treatment centers running, for clean water and sanitation facilities to stop the disease from spreading, and for road construction to make it easier for sick people in rural areas to get to hospitals.
Nearly 10,000 people in West Africa have died from the Ebola virus.
“We can neither rest, nor lift our foot off the gas,” Ms. Johnson Sirleaf said on Thursday during an earlier event on Capitol Hill hosted by Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware. “We are determined to get to zero cases by April 15.”
She said that while Liberia, with help from the United States and other countries, has made huge strides in fighting the disease since the epidemic peaked there in September, Ebola must now “be chased down in every corner” and eliminated.
Mr. Obama said efforts must focus on “ways to strengthen the economy, to rebuild infrastructure, to make sure that some of the development goals that had been set previously are accelerated to deal with some of the economic contraction” in Liberia.
Speaking at the White House before meeting with Ms. Johnson Sirleaf, Mr. Obama said it was important to “make sure that we’re not complacent so long as there’s even one case of Ebola remaining in West Africa.”
Separately on Friday, the Liberian and American governments began the first formal patient testing of ZMapp, an experimental drug intended to stop the progression of the disease. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said adults and children who agreed to take the drug would be enrolled in the study if they were admitted to Ebola treatment units in Liberia, or were health care workers who had returned to the United States after being infected with Ebola while serving in West Africa.
By all accounts, the situation in Liberia is starkly different today than it was in September, when Ebola had so ravaged the country that Mr. Obama deployed 3,000 American troops to Monrovia to build Ebola treatment facilities and to help increase efforts to fight the hemorrhagic disease.
At the time, new cases were exploding at an exponential rate, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out a dire projection that if effective methods to contain the disease could not be developed, Liberia and Sierra Leone could have a total of 1.4 million Ebola cases by January. Guinea, another country hard hit by the disease, faced a similar prognosis.
The C.D.C. noted that if everything was done right, the epidemic would be “almost ended” by Jan. 20. Success would require conducting safe funerals where no one touched bodies, treating 70 percent of patients in treatment units, and changing local behavior to stop the spread of the disease.
Now, against all odds, Liberia appears to have pulled off the C.D.C.’s best-case scenario. Ms. Johnson Sirleaf said that 13 of the country’s 15 counties had reported no new Ebola cases in more than 21 days. “We are down to one to three infections per week, and chasing the very last element of the chain of transmission,” she said.
Earlier Friday, the 101st Airborne Division formally ended its mission to fight Ebola in Liberia, as military officials declared that they had largely completed their mission there.
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