we discussed a number of titles with the organizers,

and a lot of different items were kicked around and were discussed.

But nobody suggested this one,

and the reason for that was two months ago,

Ebola was escalating exponentially

and spreading over wider geographic areas than we had ever seen,

and the world was terrified, concerned and alarmed

by this disease, in a way we've not seen in recent history.

But today, I can stand here and I can talk to you about beating Ebola

because of people whom you've never heard of,

people like Peter Clement, a Liberian doctor who's working in Lofa County,

a place that many of you have never heard of, probably, in Liberia.

The reason that Lofa County is so important is because about five months ago,

Lofa County was right at the center, the epicenter of this epidemic.

At that time, MSF and the treatment center there,

they were seeing dozens of patients every single day,

and these patients, these communities were becoming more and more terrified

as time went by, with this disease and what it was doing to their families, to their communities, to their children, to their relatives.

And so Peter Clement was charged with driving that 12-hour-long rough road

from Monrovia, the capital, up to Lofa County,

to try and help bring control to the escalating epidemic there.

And what Peter found when he arrived was the terror that I just mentioned to you.

So he sat down with the local chiefs, and he listened.

And what he heard was heartbreaking.

He heard about the devastation and the desperation of people affected by this disease.

He heard the heartbreaking stories

about not just the damage that Ebola did to people,

but what it did to families and what it did to communities.

And he listened to the local chiefs there and what they told him --

They said, "When our children are sick, when our children are dying,

we can't hold them at a time when we want to be closest to them.

When our relatives die, we can't take care of them as our tradition demands.

We are not allowed to wash the bodies to bury them the way our communities and our rituals demand.

And for this reason, they were deeply disturbed, deeply alarmed

and the entire epidemic was unraveling in front of them.

People were turning on the healthcare workers who had come,

the heroes who had come to try and help save the community,

to help work with the community, and they were unable to access them.

And what happened then was Peter explained to the leaders.

The leaders listened. They turned the tables.

And Peter explained what Ebola was. He explained what the disease was.

He explained what it did to their communities.

And he explained that Ebola threatened everything that made us human.

Ebola means you can't hold your children the way you would in this situation.

You can't bury your dead the way that you would.

You have to trust these people in these space suits to do that for you.

And ladies and gentlemen, what happened then was rather extraordinary:

The community and the health workers, Peter, they sat down together

and they put together a new plan for controlling Ebola in Lofa County.

And the reason that this is such an important story, ladies and gentlemen,

is because today, this county, which is right at the center of this epidemic

you've been watching, you've been seeing in the newspapers,

you've been seeing on the television screens,

today Lofa County is nearly eight weeks without seeing a single case of Ebola.

(Applause)

Now, this doesn't mean that the job is done, obviously.

There's still a huge risk that there will be additional cases there.

But what it does teach us is that Ebola can be beaten.

That's the key thing.

Even on this scale,

even with the rapid kind of growth that we saw in this environment here,

we now know Ebola can be beaten.

When communities come together with health care workers, work together,

that's when this disease can be stopped.

But how did Ebola end up in Lofa County in the first place?

Well, for that, we have to go back 12 months, to the start of this epidemic.

And as many of you know, this virus went undetected,

it evaded detection for three or four months when it began.

That's because this is not a disease of West Africa,

it's a disease of Central Africa, half a continent away.

People hadn't seen the disease before;

health workers hadn't seen the disease before.

They didn't know what they were dealing with,

and to make it even more complicated,

the virus itself was causing a symptom, a type of a presentation that wasn't classical of the disease.

So people didn't even recognize the disease, people who knew Ebola.

For that reason it evaded detection for some time,

But contrary to public belief sometimes these days,

once the virus was detected, there was a rapid surge in of support.

MSF rapidly set up an Ebola treatment center, as many of you know, in the area.

The World Health Organization and the partners that it works with deployed eventually hundreds of people over the next two months to be able to help track the virus.

The problem, ladies and gentlemen, is by then, this virus,

well known now as Ebola, had spread too far.

It had already outstripped what was one of the largest responses that had been mounted so far to an Ebola outbreak.

By the middle of the year, not just Guinea

but now Sierra Leone and Liberia were also infected.

As the virus was spreading geographically, the numbers were increasing

and at this time, not only were hundreds of people infected

and dying of the disease,

but as importantly, the front line responders,

the people who had gone to try and help,

the health care workers, the other responders

were also sick and dying by the dozens.

The presidents of these countries recognized the emergencies.

They met right around that time, they agreed on common action

and they put together an emergency joint operation center in Conakry

to try and work together to finish this disease and get it stopped,

to implement the strategies we talked about.

But what happened then was something we had never seen before with Ebola.

What happened then was the virus, or someone sick with the virus,

boarded an airplane, flew to another country,

and for the first time, we saw in another distant country

the virus pop up again.

This time it was in Nigeria, in the teeming metropolis of Lagos,

21 million people.

Now the virus was in that environment.

And as you can anticipate, there was international alarm,

international concern on a scale that we hadn't seen in recent years

caused by a disease like this.

The World Health Organization immediately called together an expert panel,

looked at the situation, declared an international emergency.

And in doing so, the expectation would be that there would be a huge outpouring of international assistance to help these countries

which were in so much trouble and concern at that time.

But what we saw was something very different.

There was some great response.

A number of countries came to assist -- many, many NGOs and others, as you know,

but at the same time, the opposite happened in many places.

Alarm escalated, and very soon these countries found themselves not receiving the support they needed, but increasingly isolated.

What we saw was commercial airlines started flying into these countries

and people who hadn't even been exposed to the virus

were no longer allowed to travel.

This cause not only problems, obviously, for the countries themselves,

but also for the response.

Those organizations that were trying to bring people in,

to try and help them respond to the outbreak,

they could not get people on airplanes,

they could not get them into the countries to be able to respond.

In that situation, ladies and gentleman,

a virus like Ebola takes advantage.

And what we saw then was something also we hadn't seen before.

Not only did this virus continue in the places

where they'd already become infected, but then it started to escalate

and we saw the case numbers that you see here,

something we'd never seen before on such a scale,

an exponential increase of Ebola cases

not just in these countries or the areas already infected in these countries

but also spreading further and deeper into these countries.

Ladies and gentleman, this was one of the most concerning international emergencies in public health we've ever seen.

And what happened in these countries then,

many of you saw, again, on the television, read about in the newspapers,

we saw the health system start to collapse under the weight of this epidemic.

We saw the schools begin to close, markets no longer started,no longer functioned the way that they should in these countries.

We saw that misinformation and misperceptions started to spread

even faster through the communities, which became even more alarmed about the situation.

They started to recoil from those people that you saw in those space suits,

as they call them, who had come to help them.

And then the situation deteriorated even further.

The countries had to declare a state of emergency.

Large populations needed to be quarantined in some areas, and then riots broke out.

It was a very, very terrifying situation.

Around the world, many people began to ask,

can we ever stop Ebola when it starts to spread like this?

And they started to ask, how well do we really know this virus?

The reality is we don't know Ebola extremely well.

It's a relatively modern disease in terms of what we know about it.

We've known the disease only for 40 years,

since it first popped up in Central Africa in 1976.

But despite that, we do know many things:

We know that this virus probably survives in a type of a bat.

We know that it probably enters a human population when we come in contact with a wild animal that has been infected with the virus and probably sickened by it.

Then we know that the virus spreads from person to person

through contaminated body fluids.

And as you've all seen,

we know the horrific disease that it then causes in humans,

where we see this disease cause severe fevers, diarrhea, vomiting,

and then unfortunately, in 70 percent of the cases or often more, death.

This is a very dangerous, debilitating, and deadly disease.

But despite the fact that we've not known this disease for a particularly long time,

and we don't know everything about it, we do know how to stop this disease.

There are four things that are critical to stopping Ebola.

First and foremost, the communities have got to understand this disease,

they've got to understand how it spreads and how to stop it.

And then we've got to be able to have systems that can find every single case,

every contact of those cases,

and begin to track the transmission chains so that you can stop transmission.

We have to have treatment centers, specialized Ebola treatment centers,

where the workers can be protected

as they try to provide support to the people who are infected,

so that they might survive the disease.

And then for those who do die,

we have to ensure there is a safe, but at the same time dignified, burial process,

so that there is no spread at that time as well.

So we do know how to stop Ebola, and these strategies work, ladies and gentlemen.

The virus was stopped in Nigeria by these four strategies

and the people implementing them, obviously.

It was stopped in Senegal, where it had spread, and also in the other countries

that were affected by this virus, in this outbreak.

So there's no question that these strategies actually work.

The big question, ladies and gentlemen, was whether these strategies could work

on this scale, in this situation, with so many countries affected

with the kind of exponential growth that you saw.

That was the big question that we were facing just two or three months ago.

Today we know the answer to that question.

And we know that answer because of the extraordinary work of an incredible group of NGOs, of governments, of local leaders,of U.N. agencies and many humanitarian and other organizations

that came and joined the fight to try and stop Ebola in West Africa.

But what had to be done there was slightly different.

These countries took those strategies I just showed you;

the community engagement, the case finding, contact tracing, etc.,

and they turned them on their head.

There was so much disease, they approached it differently.

What they decided to do was they would first try and slow down this epidemic

by rapidly building as many beds as possible in specialized treatment centers