15 dead after new Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo
At least 15 people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including four health care workers, died following a new outbreak of the Ebola virus, the central African nation’s 16th major brush with the deadly disease, the country’s health ministry said Thursday.
Health officials have recorded at least 28 suspected cases of the disease in the southern Kasai province that borders Angola. Officials said laboratory tests confirmed the presence of the Zaire strain of the virus, which has caused two of the worst Ebola outbreaks in Africa, sickening tens of thousands of people.
A hemorrhagic fever endemic in animal populations that reside in Africa’s tropical forests, Ebola can spread through direct contact with the body fluids of an infected person, including through surfaces and materials containing the fluids, such as sheets and clothes. It was first identified in humans in 1976. Symptoms include fever, fatigue, muscle pain, headache, vomiting, diarrhea and unexplained bleeding or bruising. The disease has an average case fatality rate of roughly 50 %, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
The first known case, called an index case, involved a 34-year-old pregnant woman who was admitted to a local hospital last month with high fever and vomiting, the World Health Organization said. Health officials did not say whether the woman had died.
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s last outbreak of the Ebola virus occurred in April 2022 and lasted less than three months. The world’s largest Ebola outbreak swept through parts of West Africa – Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia – between 2013 and 2016, killing more than 11,300 people. From 2018 until 2020, more than 2,200 people died during the second largest outbreak of the virus, occurring primarily in eastern Congo’s North Kivu province.
The virus’s sequencing data shows that the current Ebola outbreak was triggered by a new transfer of the virus from an animal host into the human population, said Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious-disease expert at Emory University.
“Whenever there’s a new Ebola outbreak – particularly when it occurs in a locality where other outbreaks have happened before – we want to know whether the virus is a virus that is potentially coming from a survivor of a previous outbreak who has reactivated the virus and passed it on to someone else, or whether this is the new reintroduction of the virus from a new zoonotic host into the human population,” Titanji said.
Titanji said outbreak investigators will have to determine the animal source and how the index case came in contact with the animal that then introduced the infection into the human population, causing the outbreak.
Congo has deployed a national rapid response team to the Kasai province to aid in disease response and prevention, the country’s health ministry said Thursday.
“We are acting decisively to rapidly stop the spread of the virus and protect communities,” Mohamed Janabi, WHO Regional Director for Africa, said in a statement. “Building on the country’s long-standing expertise in combating viral outbreaks, we are working closely with health authorities to scale up key response measures to end the outbreak as quickly as possible.”
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, said on X that the WHO is supporting the Democratic Republic of Congo’s response to the outbreak, “deploying experts and medical supplies needed to protect health workers and care for patients.”
Health officials said the country has a stockpile of medication to treat infections and roughly 2,000 doses of the Ervebo Ebola vaccine, which will be given to people exposed to the virus and health care personnel working on the front lines.