New death in DR Congo Ebola outbreak

MBANDAKA

The death toll from the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has risen to 26 after a person died in the northwest city of Mbandaka, Health Minister Oly Ilunga has said.

“A death was recorded [on May 20), while two people who had been confirmed as ill with the Ebola virus were cured on Saturday [May 19],” he said.

“The two people who were cured have returned to their families,” he told reporters.

Those two cases occurred at Bikoro, a remote rural area where the outbreak was announced on May 8 and then spread to Mbandaka - an event that has deeply worried health experts.

The current toll is 49 cases, comprising 22 confirmed by laboratory tests, 21 probable cases and six suspected cases, Ilunga said. Three new cases had been reported on Saturday.

Authorities in the DRC on Monday were to launch a programme to immunize first responders with an experimental Ebola vaccine.

The first phase will unfold in Mbandaka on May 21, followed on May 19 in Bikoro, about 150 kilometers away.

Donors have promised 300,000 doses of the vaccine, a government spokesman said, of which around 5,400 have already been received.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has dispatched 35 immunization experts, including 16 mobilised during the last deadly outbreak in West Africa which occurred in 2013. The rest of the team is made up of newly trained Congolese staff.

“I’m pleased to say that vaccination is starting as we speak,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, said on May 21 as the UN’s health agency met in an assembly.

Alarm bells sounded on Thursday when a first case was reported in Mbandaka, a city of around 1.2 million people located on the Congo River.

A major transport hub, the city is located upstream from the DRC capital Kinshasa and Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, and downstream from Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, one of the poorest countries in the world.

One of the world’s most notorious diseases, Ebola is a virus-caused haemorrhagic fever that in extreme cases causes fatal bleeding from internal organs, the mouth, eyes or ears.

It has a natural reservoir in a species of tropical African fruit bats, from which it is believed to leap to humans who kill and butcher the animals for food.