JENEWONDE, Liberia — A schoolteacher brought his sick daughter from Liberia’s capital to this small town of 300 people. Soon he and his entire family were dead and buried in the forest nearby, along with an increasing number of residents.

The community of Jenewonde has become a new hotspot for the Ebola outbreak in Liberia. With cases on the decline in the capital, officials must now turn their attention to hard-to-reach places where the disease is flaring.

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Health care workers load the body of a dead woman suspected of dying from Ebola, onto a truck in Jenewonde near the Liberia-Sierra Leone border, where medical care is now largely dependent on volunteers with Doctors Without Borders. The Associated Press

Jenewonde, near the border with Sierra Leone, has reportedly lost about 10 percent of its population to Ebola since late September. Markets and farms nearby have been abandoned.

Momo Sheriff, who lost his son to Ebola, said there is no health care in the community.

“If the government does not take action, everybody will die in this town,” Sheriff told The Associated Press. “We are burying two dead bodies today. We don’t know who it will be tomorrow. Every day we have to cry.”

Juma Mansaray lost her mother and grandmother on the same day. She said the community has been ostracized.

“Everywhere we go, the people will drive us away,” she said. “We can’t even go to the local market to buy pepper or food because people think we are cursed.”

The international response must adapt to this new phase, Doctors Without Borders warned. As Jenewonde saw, just one case can ignite a chain of transmission that leads to a dozen more infections, said Fasil Tezera, head of operations for the charity in Liberia.

Liberia has suffered the greatest death toll in the Ebola epidemic, with 2,766 deaths blamed on the first-ever outbreak in West Africa. The World Health Organization says that after months of efforts to isolate the sick and remove bodies of victims safely, Ebola appears to be declining in some parts of Liberia, including the capital.

“In the cities, I think we have sufficient resources,” Tezera said. “We cannot bring everybody to big ETU’s,” or Ebola treatment units.

The outbreak now also needs a series of “rapid response teams” that can bring care to remote villages, rather than trying to get sick people out, the group says. Such teams would include medics, disinfection specialists and psychologists or social workers and could stamp out a budding outbreak in a village before it has a chance to spread. And they could work much faster than a treatment center can be built.

Tezera said that such mobile teams were frequently deployed in previous Ebola outbreaks, which typically hit remote areas of central or eastern Africa. The teams could travel by truck, boat or helicopter, if those assets are provided.

“If you handle it at the small village level, then you can contain it,” he said.

Experts warn that the disease could flare again in Monrovia or other places where it seems to have subsided. As long as Ebola is circulating in this highly mobile region, no area is safe, said Tezera, and cases continue to rise in Guinea and Sierra Leone. There were 40 new Ebola cases in and around the Sierra Leonean capital of Freetown in the preceding 24 hours, authorities there said late Sunday.

A key component to stopping transmission everywhere is gaining the trust and cooperation of villagers, Tezera added. That has been a problem in Jenewonde.

Abdullai Kamara, a burial team leader for Grand Cape Mount County, said the people of Jenewonde have been stubborn and in constant denial, which he cites as the reason the disease is still spreading.

Ebola is contracted through direct contact with the bodily fluids of the sick and the dead. For weeks, residents of Jenewonde have been chasing away safe-burial teams and hiding the sick from outside health workers, he said.

“Our people played deaf ear to what was happening,” Kamara said. “They denied the truth.”

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