Democratic Republic of the Congo
DRC: Health Ministry Confirms Third Ebola Case In North Kivu Province
The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) provincial Health Minister Eugene Nzanzu Salita on Friday confirmed a third Ebola case in the country’s North Kivu province this week, reported Al Jazeera.
“We are in a meeting to gather all the information on the investigations done around this case,” Salita said.
Earlier this week, the DRC health ministry reported the death of a woman from Ebola in Butembo, a city in North Kivu Province and an epicenter of a previous Ebola outbreak that was declared over in June. She was married to a survivor of the previous outbreak.
On Friday, Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program, said two more cases have been confirmed since then, including another person who has died.
Ryan said the number of people who might have been exposed to the virus has risen from over 70 on Monday to 182 as of Friday. He added that all but three of those people have been contacted and more than half of them were previously vaccinated against Ebola during prior outbreaks.
“We’re seeing some benefits of the previous vaccination, but obviously we have to look at the length of time that vaccine protects,” he said.
Ryan added that new shipments of the Ebola vaccine have arrived in Butembo this week. He said the DRC health authorities are setting up ultracold-chain storage equipment in Butembo to store the vaccine and personnel are being trained.
Ryan said the WHO is still unclear around the original community source of the first Ebola case. He said that the DRC’s National Institute of Biomedical Research is sequencing samples of the virus at its main lab in Kinshasa to determine whether the new cases are associated with the last Butembo outbreak. The results are expected over the weekend.
The Ebola outbreak that was declared over in June in the DRC lasted for nearly two years. It was the second-largest in the world. 3,481 total cases and 2,299 deaths were reported during the outbreak, according to the WHO.
